We quantify the effect of financial leverage on stock return volatility in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with debt and equity claims. We study the effects of financial leverage on the market portfolio, and on a small firm with idiosyncratic and market risk. In an economy with both a...

Financial markets are typically characterized by high (low) price level and low (high) volatility during boom (bust) periods, suggesting that price and volatility tend to move together with different market conditions/states. By proposing a simple heterogeneous agent model of fundamentalists and...

Financial economists have long been interested in the empirical relation between the conditional mean and conditional volatility of excess stock market returns, often referred to as the risk-return relation. Unfortunately, the body of empirical evidence on the risk-return relation is mixed and...

In the years following the publication of Black and Scholes [7], numerous alternative models have been proposed for pricing and hedging equity derivatives. Prominent examples include stochastic volatility models, jump diffusion models, and models based on Levy processes. These all have their own...

Value stocks have higher average returns than growth stocks. At the same time, the duration of value stocks' cash flows is considerably shorter than that of growth stocks. We show that when investors can fully distinguish short- and long-run consumption risk components of dividend growth...

Evidence of stock return predictability by financial ratios is still controversial, as documented by inconsistent results for in-sample and out-of-sample regressions and by substantial parameter instability. This paper shows that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if the...

Investment is often irreversible, especially at the aggregate level. This paper proposes and solves a general equilibrium model of technology adotpion when investment in the new technlogy is irreversible. In contrast to prior research, we consider a setup where the returns on technology adoption...

The main contribution of this work is to provide a dynamic general equilibrium model of asset allocation, allowing to reconcile economic theory with several puzzling contradictions recently pointed out in the literature: (i) the asset allocation puzzle, (ii) the observed time-variation in...

Consider a collection of agents with stochastically fluctuating heterogeneous endowments. It seems natural that credit is the appropriate market mechanism for insuring such fluctuations: individuals save when endowment is high, and deplete their savings or borrow when their endowment is low. The...