We present data from the Survey of Consumer Finances showing that the increased earnings (labor income) inequality, in combination with increased stockmarket participation, has roughly doubled stockholders' share of aggregate labor income in the last four decades. We explore the impact of the...

Although the effects of economic news announcements on asset prices are well established, theserelationships are unlikely to be stable. This paper documents the time variation in the responses of yield curves and exchange rates using high-frequency data from January 2000 through August 2011....

This paper explains the emergence of liquidity traps in the aftermath of large-scale financial crises, as happened in the US 1930s, Japan 1990s and recently in the US and Europe. The paper introduces a new balance sheet channel that links equity capital to the risk-free interest rate. When...

Monetary policy shocks have a large impact on stock prices during narrow time windows centered around press releases by the FOMC. We use spatial autoregressions to decompose the overall effect of monetary policy shocks into a direct effect and a network effect. We attribute 50 to 85 percent of...

The VIX, the stock market option-based implied volatility, strongly co-moves with measures of the monetary policy stance. When decomposing the VIX into two components, a proxy for risk aversion and expected stock market volatility (“uncertainty”), we find that a lax monetary policy decreases...

Since December 2008, the Federal Reserve's traditional policy instrument, the target federal funds rate, has been effectively at its lower bound of zero. In order to further ease the stance of monetary policy as the economic outlook deteriorated, the Federal Reserve purchased substantial...

To measure the global spillovers of a Chinese slowdown on the long-term nominal interest rates in the US/Germany, I model the US/German nominal term structure jointly in the post financial crisis (FC) sample, including the Chinese leading indicator as a new factor. I use an affine term structure...

We exploit differences in institutional and macroeconomic environments to shed light on what drives variation in the aggregate earnings-returns relation over time within the U.S. and across countries. We find that both intertemporal and cross-country variation in the aggregate earnings-returns...

Although the effects of economic news announcements on asset prices are well established, theserelationships are unlikely to be stable. This paper documents the time variation in the responses of yield curves and exchange rates using high-frequency data from January 2000 through August 2011....