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Journal Article
Monetary policy transmission through the consumption-wealth channel
Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission
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A primer on the economics and time series econometrics of wealth effects: a comment
In a recent paper ("A Primer on the Economics and Time Series Econometrics of Wealth Effects," 2001), Davis and Palumbo investigate the empirical relation between three cointegrated variables: aggregate consumption, asset wealth, and labor income. Although cointegration implies that an equilibrium relation ties these variables together in the long run, the authors focus on the following structural question about the short-run dynamics: "How quickly does consumption adjust to changes in income and wealth? Is the adjustment rapid, occurring within a quarter, or more sluggish, taking place ...
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Idiosyncratic risk and volatility bounds, or can models with idiosyncratic risk solve the equity premium puzzle?
This paper uses Hansen and Jagannathan's (1991) volatility bounds to evaluate models with idiosyncratic consumption risk. I show that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have CRRA preferences and the distribution of the idiosyncratic shock is independent of the aggregate state. Following Mankiw (1986), I then show that idiosyncratic risk can help to enter the bounds when idiosyncratic uncertainty depends on the aggregate state of the economy. Since individual consumption data are not reliable, I compute an upper bound of the volatility bounds using ...
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Resurrecting the (C)CAPM: a cross-sectional test when risk premia are time-varying
This paper explores the ability of theoretically based asset pricing models such as the CAPM and the consumption CAPM-referred to jointly as the (C)CAPM - to explain the cross-section of average stock returns. Unlike many previous empirical tests of the (C)CAPM, we specify the pricing kernel as a conditional linear factor model, as would be expected if risk premia vary over time. Central to our approach is the use of a conditioning variable which proxies for fluctuations in the log consumption-aggregate wealth ratio and is likely to be important for summarizing conditional expectations of ...
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Consumption, aggregate wealth and expected stock returns
This paper studies the role of detrended wealth in predicting stock returns. We call a transitory movement in wealth one that produces a deviation from its shared trend with consumption and labor income. Using U.S. quarterly stock market data, we find that these trend deviations in wealth are strong predictors of both real stock returns and excess returns over a Treasury bill rate. We also find that this variable is a better forecaster of future returns at short and intermediate horizons than is the dividend yield, the earnings yield, the dividend payout ratio and several other popular ...