Conventional wisdom holds that conservative investors should avoid exposure to foreign currency risk. Even if they hold foreign equities, they should hedge the currency exposure of these positions and should hold only domestic Treasury bills. This paper argues that the conventional wisdom may be...

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 uses a disaggregated approach to study the volatility of common stocks at the market, industry, and firm levels. Over the period 1962-97 there has been a noticeable increase in firm-level volatility relative to market volatility. Accordingly correlations among individual stocks and...

Error-correction models for cointegrated economic variables are commonly interpreted as reflecting partial adjustment of one variable to another. We show that error-correction models may also arise because one variable forecasts another. Reduced-form estimates of error-correction models cannot...

We empirically decompose the S&P 500's dividend yield into (1) a rational forecast of long-run real dividend growth, (2) the subjectively expected risk premium, and (3) residual mispricing attributed to the market's forecast of dividend growth deviating from the rational forecast. Modigliani and...

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...

The effect of money stock announcements on the Federal funds rate has been attributed informally to the information conveyed by the announcements about aggregate reserve demand. This "Aggregate Information Hypothesis" explains the effect without reference to Federal Reserve intervention in the...

According to conventional wisdom, long-term bonds are appropriate for long-term investors who value stability of income. We develop a model of optimal consumption and portfolio choice for infinitely-lived investors facing stochastic interest rates, solve it using an approximate analytical...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and...