During recession, many macroeconomic variables display higher levels of volatility. We show how introducing an AR(1)-ARCH(1) driving process into the canonical Lucas consumption CAPM framework can account for the empirically observed greater volatilty of asset returns during recessions. In particular, agents' joint forecasting of levels and time-varying second moments transforms symmetric-volat...

Under the assumptions of the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM), Pareto optimal consumption allocations are characterized by each agent’s consumption process being adapted to the filtration generated by the aggregate consumption process of the economy. The wealth processes of the agents, however, are adapted to the finer filtration generated by aggregate consumption and the c...

This article analyzes a dynamic general equilibrium under a generalization of Merton’s (1987) investor recognition hypothesis. A class of informationally constrained investors is assumed to implement only a particular trading strategy. The model implies that, all else being equal, a risk premium on a less visible stock need not be higher than that on a more visible stock with a lower volatility...

Is Beta Dead?” (Wallace [1980]) and other recent articles have asked whether broad consequences, disastrous to modern investment technology, would result from misspecification of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), or worse yet, from falsehood of the model. The criticisms have cited imprecise specification of the market portfolio as a misapplication of the CAPM, and have emphasized the diff...

The paper shows that turnover proxies for firm-specific uncertainty, not liquidity risk. I show that turnover is unrelated to several alternative measures of liquidity risk and that liquidity risk factors cannot explain why higher turnover predicts lower future returns. I show that, because high turnover firms have high uncertainty, high turnover firms beat the CAPM when aggregate volatility in...

By exploiting the structural tax rate changes created by the Bush-era tax acts in 2001 and 2003, this study offers a first direct investigation of how the differential taxation of financial assets affects households’ asset location and allocation into taxable and tax-deferred accounts in a natural experimental framework. Because bonds are heavily taxed assets, relative to stocks, and tax treatm...

We study the relative risk of value and growth stocks. We find that time-varying risk goes in the right direction in explaining the value premium. Value betas tend to covary positively, and growth betas tend to covary negatively with the expected market risk premium. Our inference differs from that of previous studies because we sort betas on the expected market risk premium, instead of on the ...

In this paper, we develop a new capital adequacy buffer model (CABM) which is sensitive to dynamic economic circumstances. The model, which measures additional bank capital required to compensate for fluctuating credit risk, is a novel combination of the Merton structural model, which measures distance to default, and the timeless capital asset pricing model (CAPM) which measures additional ret...