Most studies of the expectations theory of the term structure reject the model. However, the significance of the rejections depend strongly upon the form of the test. In this paper, we use the pattern of rejection across maturities to back out the implied behavior of time-varying risk premia...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Domestic investors hold a substantially larger proportion of their wealth portfolios in domestic assets than standard portfolio theory would suggest. This phenomenon has been called equity home bias.' In the absence of this home bias, investors would optimally diversify away domestic output...

In this paper, I empirically examine consumption smoothing behavior across a broad group of countries using a unique data set that indicates whether residents in a country face an official government restriction. I then ask whether the ex ante consumption movements among restricted countries...

Standard theoretical models predict that domestic residents should diversify their portfolios into foreign assets much more than observed in practice. Whether this lack of diversification is important depends upon the potential gains from risk-sharing. General equilibrium models and consumption...

This paper describes a class of stochastic stabilizing policies within asset price regimes that can be easily incorporated into the framework of regime switching recently proposed by Froot and Obstfeld (1991). In contrast to previous treatments of market-driven fundamentals within the regime,...

Recent research in international business cycles based upon complete markets has found that international consumption correlations are lower than predicted by the standard risk-sharing implications of these models. In this paper, I use regression tests to ask whether two different types of...