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Working Paper
Replicating Business Cycles and Asset Returns with Sentiment and Low Risk Aversion
I solve for the sequences of shocks (or wedges) that allow a standard real business cycle model to exactly replicate the quarterly time paths of U.S. macroeconomic variables and asset returns since 1960. The resulting shock sequences can be grouped into three main categories: (1) shocks that affect household sentiment and preferences, (2) shocks that appear in the law of motion for capital, and (3) shocks that appear in the production function for output. For most variables including output, no single shock category is clearly dominant in explaining the observed movements in U.S. data. While ...
Working Paper
Real Business Cycles, Animal Spirits, and Stock Market Valuation
This paper develops a real business cycle model with five types of fundamental shocks and one "equity sentiment shock" that captures animal spirits-driven fluctuations. The representative agent's perception that movements in equity value are partly driven by sentiment turns out to be close to self-fulfilling. I solve for the sequences of shock realizations that allow the model to exactly replicate the observed time paths of U.S. consumption, investment, hours worked, the stock of physical capital, capital's share of income, and the S&P 500 market value from 1960.Q1 onwards. The ...
Working Paper
A Behavioral Foundation for the Investment Wedge
Motivated by behavioral evidence, we develop a tractable method for incorporating competition neglect in a general equilibrium firm investment problem. Competition neglect causes firms to systematically underestimate the investment of their competitors. When we introduce competition neglect into a canonical RBC model, this friction acts like an investment wedge that causes overinvestment at first, and underinvestment later on. In contrast to a model with exogenous investment shocks, these dynamics are accompanied by realistic variation in equity premia, even in the absence of financial ...