We use data from the aggregate stock and dividend futures markets to quantify how investors' expectations about economic growth evolve across horizons in response to the new coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and subsequent policy responses until July 2020. Dividend futures, which are claims to...

I document that the term structure of one-period expected returns on dividend-claims is counter-cyclical: it is downward sloping in good times, but upward sloping in bad times. The counter-cyclical variation is consistent with theories of long-run risk and habit, but these theories cannot...

We test whether the low-risk effect is driven by (a) leverage constraints and thus risk should be measured using beta vs. (b) behavioral effects and thus risk should be measured by idiosyncratic risk. Beta depends on volatility and correlation, where only volatility is related to idiosyncratic...

Using data from a decade of surveys of corporate managers, I find evidence that firms with higher expected stock returns have a higher perceived cost of equity and use higher discount rates in capital budgeting. Variation in expected stock returns, as measured by exposure to equity risk factors,...

Motivated by the public debate regarding corporate responsibility, we construct a memory-based cognitive model of decision making to illustrate how corporate and political communication can impact policy preferences. We test the predictions of our model in a new large-scale experimental survey...

Motivated by the public debate regarding corporate responsibility, we construct a memory-based model of decision-making to illustrate how corporate and political communication can impact policy preferences. We test the predictions of our model in a new large-scale survey of U.S. citizens on...

We test whether the "representative agent" has intertemporally consistent expectations about time variation in the equity premium. First, we use option prices to estimate the expected future log equity premium (the forward rate) and compare this estimate to the log equity premium estimated in...

Standard theory implies that the discount rates used by firms in investment decisions play a key role in determining investment and in transmitting shocks to asset prices and interest rates to the real economy. However, there exists little evidence on how corporate discount rates change over...

We study how firms' perceived cost of capital is related to risk factors in financial markets. The analysis is based on hand-collected data from Gormsen and Huber (2022), which cover firms' perceived cost of capital and discount rates for more than 2,500 firms. Consistent with Modigliani-Miller,...