The welfare benefits of financial markets depend in large part on how effectively households use these markets. The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to measure accurately, and because households face constraints that are not captured by textbook...

This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work, and on the tradeoff between risk and return. Modern research seeks to understand the behavior of the stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices all assets in the economy. The...

This paper reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The paper lists some important stylized facts that characterize US data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which features...

This paper reviews the behavior of stock prices in relation to consumption. The paper lists some important stylized facts that characterize US data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which features of the US...

This paper reviews the literature on the relation between short- and long-term interest rates. It summarizes the mixed evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure: when long rates are high relative to short rates, short rates tend to rise as implied by the expectations...

This paper uses an intertemporal equilibrium asset pricing model to interpret the cross-sectional pattern of stock and bond returns. The model relates assets' mean returns to their covariances with the contemporaneous return and news about future returns on the market portfolio. In a departure...

This paper studies tests of predictability in regressions with a given AR(1) regressor and an asset return dependent variable measured over a short or long horizon. The paper shows that when there is a persistent predictable component in the return, an increase in the horizon may increase the R2...

This paper argues that a clear understanding of the stochastic growth model can best be achieved by working out an approximate analytical solution. The proposed solution method replaces the true budget constraints and Euler equations of economic agents with loglinear approximations. The model...

This paper proposes a new way to generalize the insights of static asset pricing theory to a multi-period setting. The paper uses a loglinear approximation to the budget constraint to substitute out consumption from a standard intertemporal asset pricing model. In a homoskedastic lognormal...

This paper summarizes earlier research On the sources of variation in monthly U.S. stock returns in the period 1927-88. A log-linear model is used to break unexpected returns into changing expectations about future dividends and changing expectations about future returns. Even though stock...