We examine asset prices in environments where the risk-free rate lies considerably below the growth rate. To do so, we introduce a tractable model of a production economy featuring heterogeneous trading technologies, as well as idiosyncratic and aggregate risk. We show that allowing for the...

The historical returns on equity index options are well known to be strikingly negative. That is typically explained either by investors having convex marginal utility over stock returns (e.g. crash/variance aversion) or by intermediaries demanding a premium for hedging risk. This paper examines...

We characterize the relation between exchange rates and their macroeconomic fundamentals without committing to a specific model of preferences, endowment or menu of traded assets. When investors can trade home and foreign currency risk-free bonds, the exchange rate appreciates in states that are...

Value investing delivers volatile returns, with large drawdowns during both market booms and busts. This paper interprets these returns through an intertemporal CAPM, which predicts that aggregate cash flow, discount rate, and volatility news all move value returns. We document that indeed these...

We document that the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries exhibits properties that are consistent with a hedging perspective of safe assets. The convenience yield tends to be low when the covariance of Treasury returns with the aggregate stock market returns is high. A decomposition of the...

This paper proposes a new approach to the "factor zoo" conundrum. Instead of applying dimension-reduction methods to a large set of portfolios obtained from sorts on characteristics, I construct factors that summarize the information in characteristics across assets and then sort assets into...

Benchmark finance and macroeconomic models appear to deliver conflicting estimates of the natural rate and bond risk premia. This natural rate puzzle applies not only in the U.S. but across many advanced economies. We use a unified no-arbitrage macro- finance model with two trend factors to...

This paper studies whether green investors can influence corporate greenhouse gas emissions through capital markets, either by divesting their stock and limiting polluters' access to capital, or holding polluters' stock and engaging with management. We focus on public pension funds, classifying...

China's admission into the WTO in 2001 heralded a new era of globalization, increasing both import competition in domestic markets and foreign opportunities for US firms. In the aggregate, the average annual profitability of US public firms during the post globalization period (2003-2019)...

We show that firms' nominal required returns to capital (i.e., their discount rates) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Such nominally sticky discount rates imply that increases in expected inflation directly lower firms' real discount rates and thereby raise real investment. We...