The current stable-NAV model for prime money market funds exposes fund investors and systemically important borrowers to runs like those that occurred after the failure of Lehman in September 2008. This working paper, by the Squam Lake Group, argues that, to reduce this risk, funds should have...

The poor performance of consumption-based asset pricing models relative to traditional portfolio-based asset pricing models is one of the great disappointments of the empirical asset pricing literature. We show that the external habit-formation model economy of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) can...

We present a consumption-based model that explains the procyclical variation of stock prices, the long-horizon predictability of excess stock returns, and the countercyclical variation of stock market volatility. Our model has an i.i.d. consumption growth driving process, and adds a slow-moving...