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No good deals—no bad models
Faced with the problem of pricing complex contingent claims, investors seek to make their valuations robust to model uncertainty. We construct a notion of a model-uncertainty-induced utility function and show that model uncertainty increases investors? effective risk aversion. Using this utility function, we extend the ?no good deals? methodology of Cochrane and Sa-Requejo (2000) to compute lower and upper good-deal bounds in the presence of model uncertainty. We illustrate the methodology using some numerical examples.
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Term structures of asset prices and returns
We explore the term structures of claims to a variety of cash flows: U.S. government bonds (claims to dollars), foreign government bonds (claims to foreign currency), inflation-adjusted bonds (claims to the price index), and equity (claims to future equity indexes or dividends). Average term structures reflect the dynamics of the dollar pricing kernel, of cash flow growth, and of their interaction. We use simple models to illustrate how relationships between the two components can deliver term structures with a wide range of levels and shapes.
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The Federal Reserve and market confidence
We discover a novel monetary policy shock that has a widespread impact on aggregate financial conditions and market confidence. Our shock can be summarized by the response of long-horizon yields to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements; not only is it orthogonal to changes in the near-term path of policy rates, but it also explains more than half of the abnormal variation in the yield curve on announcement days. We find that our shock is positively related to changes in real interest rates and market volatility, and negatively related to market returns and mortgage issuance, ...
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Information acquisition and financial intermediation
Informational advantages of specialists relative to households lead to disagreement between the two in an intermediated market. Although households can acquire additional signals to reduce the informational asymmetry, the additional information is costly, making it rational for households to limit the accuracy of the signals they observe. I show that this leads the equity capital constraint to bind more frequently, making the asset prices in the economy more volatile unconditionally. When disagreement between households and specialists is high, however, return volatility decreases. I find ...
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Intermediary leverage cycles and financial stability
We present a theory of financial intermediary leverage cycles within a dynamic model of the macroeconomy. Intermediaries face risk-based funding constraints that give rise to procyclical leverage and a procyclical share of intermediated credit. The pricing of risk varies as a function of intermediary leverage, and asset return exposures to intermediary leverage shocks earn a positive risk premium. Relative to an economy with constant leverage, financial intermediaries generate higher consumption growth and lower consumption volatility in normal times, at the cost of endogenous systemic ...
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Forecasting Macroeconomic Risks
We construct risks around consensus forecasts of real GDP growth, unemployment, and inflation. We find that risks are time-varying, asymmetric, and partly predictable. Tight financial conditions forecast downside growth risk, upside unemployment risk, and increased uncertainty around the inflation forecast. Growth vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and conditional variance of GDP growth are negatively correlated: downside risks are driven by lower mean and higher variance when financial conditions tighten. Similarly, employment vulnerability arises as the conditional mean and ...
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The Overnight Drift
This paper documents large positive returns to holding U.S. equity futures overnight during the opening hours of European markets. These returns are not explained by liquidity risk, volatility risk, tail events, or overnight news. Instead, consistent with models of inventory risk and demand for immediacy, we demonstrate a strong relationship with market sell-offs from the previous intraday session. Moreover, price reversals are strongest at the opening of European markets, when overnight trading volumes peak. Finally, the timing of overnight returns shifts predictably in response to exogenous ...
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It’s What You Say and What You Buy: A Holistic Evaluation of the Corporate Credit Facilities
We evaluate the impact of the Federal Reserve corporate credit facilities (PMCCF and SMCCF). A third of the positive effect on prices and liquidity occurred on the announcement date. We document immediate pass-through into primary markets, particularly for eligible issuers. Improvements continue as additional information is shared and purchases begin, with the impact of bond purchases larger than the impact of purchases of ETFs. Exploiting cross-sectional evidence, we see the greatest impact on investment grade bonds and in industries less affected by COVID, concluding that the improvement in ...
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Bank Capital and Real GDP Growth
We study the relationship between bank capital ratios and the distribution of future real GDP growth. Growth in the aggregate bank capital ratio corresponds to a smaller left tail of GDP—smaller crisis probability—but at the cost of a smaller right tail of growth outcomes—smaller probability of exuberant growth. This trade-off persists at horizons of up to eight quarters, highlighting the long-range consequences of changes in bank capital. We show that the predictive information in bank capital ratio growth is over and above that contained in real credit growth, suggesting importance ...
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Measuring Corporate Bond Market Dislocations
We measure dislocations in the market for corporate bonds in real time with the Corporate Bond Market Distress Index (CMDI), allowing for the aggregation of a broad set of measures of market functioning from primary and secondary bond markets into a single measure. The index quantifies dislocations from a preponderance-of-metrics perspective, ensuring that the measure of market distress is not driven by any one statistic. We document that the index correctly identifies periods of dislocations, is robust to alternative choices of the aggregation procedure, and provides differential predictive ...