This paper explores the implications of a novel class of preferences for the behavior of asset prices. Following a suggestion by Marshall (1920), we entertain the possibility that people derive utility not only from consumption, but also from the very act of saving. These “saving-based”...

We derive exact expressions for the risk premia for general distributions in a Lucas economy and show that the errors when using log-linear approximations can be economically significant when the shocks are nonnormal. Assuming growth rates are Normal Inverse Gaussian (NIG) and fitting the...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for the 50 US states. We find that the rate of risk aversion under the...

This paper performs a thorough statistical examination of the time-series properties of the daily market volatility index (VIX) from the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The motivation lies not only on the widespread consensus that the VIX is a barometer of the overall market sentiment as...

The recent macro-finance literature does not agree either about the empirical properties of the expectation part and of the term premium on long-term bonds or about the importance or even the direction of the relationship between the term premium and future economic activity. This paper proposes...

In this paper, we construct the three-factor model introduced by Chen et al. (2010) for a European sample covering 10 countries from the European Monetary Union and the period from 1990 to 2006. Two key findings result. First, we show that the properties of the European factors are comparable to...

This paper investigates the downside risk exposure of international stock returns in 14 major industrialized economies around the world. For the period 1975–2010, we find that differences in returns on value and growth portfolios can be rationalized by assets’ reagibilities to market’s...

Recent theoretical works have found a link between return sign forecastability and conditional volatility. This paper compares the predictive performance of the conditional country risk and the conditional residual risk in forecasting the direction of change in the return on the UK stock market...

We propose an equilibrium asset pricing model in which agents with heterogeneous beliefs care about relative performance. We find that the concern with relative performance leads agents to trade more similarly, a development that has two effects. First, similar trading directly decreases...

The Intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM) from Merton (1973) has had a strong impact in empirical asset pricing leading to numerous multifactor models. This paper shows that the explanatory power of the ICAPM application by Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004) relies critically on the computation of Dimson...