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Working Paper
The Real Term Premium in a Stationary Economy with Segmented Asset Markets
This paper proposes an equilibrium model to explain the positive and sizable term premia observed in the data. We introduce a slow mean-reverting process of consumption growth and a segmented asset market mechanism with heterogeneous trading technology to otherwise a standard heterogeneous agent general equilibrium model. First, a slow mean-reverting consumption growth process implies that the expected consumption growth rate is only slightly countercyclical and the process can exhibit a near zero first-order autocorrelation as seen in the data. The very small countercyclicality of the ...
Discussion Paper
Has Broader Stock Market Participation Changed How Interest Rates Affect the Economy?
Stock market participation in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past four decades. In the mid-1980s, fewer than 30 percent of households held equity. By the early 2000s, more than half of U.S. households owned equity, either directly or through mutual funds, 401(k)s, and IRAs. As participation widened, the way stock market fluctuations passed through to household spending may have changed, with potential implications for how the broader economy behaves. An argument can be made that the rise in equity market participation has dampened the response of output to interest rate changes as ...
Working Paper
Limited Participation in Equity Markets and Business Cycles
This paper studies how the rise in US households' participation in equity markets affects the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to the economy. I embed limited participation into a New Keynesian framework for the US economy to analyze the individual and aggregate effects of higher participation. I derive three main results. First, participants are relatively more responsive to shocks than nonparticipants. Second, higher participation reduces the effectiveness of monetary policy. Third, with higher participation the economy becomes less volatile. I contrast key predictions of my model with ...