We study a production economy with regime switching in the conditional mean and volatility of productivity growth. The representative agent has generalized disappointment aversion (GDA) preferences. We show that volatility risk in productivity growth carries a positive and sizable risk premium in levered equity. Our model can endogenously generate long-run risks in the volatility of consumption...

We develop a two-country overlapping-generations model with domestic financial frictions and show that cross-country differences in financial development explain three recent patterns of international capital flows. In our model, domestic financial frictions distort the interest rates and production efficiency in the less financially developed country. Capital flows not only lead to cross-count...

This paper studies the efficiency of competitive equilibria in economies where the expansion of investment is facilitated by securitization. We show that the use of securitization is generally associated with constrained inefficient aggregate investment, thereby justifying regulatory intervention in markets for securitized assets. We examine the effectiveness of three policy instruments to addr...

This paper incorporates endogenous credit constraints in a search model of unemployment. These constraints generate multiple equilibria supported by self-fulfilling beliefs. A stock market bubble exists through a positive feedback loop mechanism. The collapse of the bubble tightens the credit constraints, causing firms to reduce investment and hirings. Unemployed workers are hard to find jobs g...

This paper examines the impact of anticipated and unanticipated monetary policy announcements, of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee on UK sectoral stock returns. The monetary policy shock is generated from the change in the three-month sterling LIBOR futures contract. Using a panel GMM estimator we find that both the expected and unexpected components of monetary changes are signi...

A standard assumption of structural models of default is that firms assets evolve exogenously. In this paper, we document the importance of accounting for investment options in models of credit risk. In the presence of financing and investment frictions, firm-level variables which proxy for asset composition carry explanatory power for credit spreads beyond leverage. As a result, cross-sectiona...

In this analysis the interdependence between foreign exchange markets and stock markets for selected accession and cohesion countries is discussed. This includes basic theoretical approaches. Monthly data for the nominal stock market indices and nominal exchange rates are used, where Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Hungary are included in the analysis. Fr...

We introduce habit formation in a model that studies the link between international trade in financial assets, economic growth, and welfare. As with time separable preferences asset trade increases the mean growth rate, but it also increases growth-volatility. We demonstrate that the welfare gain from asset trade is lower with habit persistence in consumption. This reflects that the habit-formi...

In standardWalrasian macro-finance models, pecuniary externalities such as fire sales lead to overinvestment in illiquid assets or underprovision of liquidity. We investigate whether imperfect competition (Cournot) improves welfare through internalizing the externality and find that this is far from guaranteed. In a standard model of liquidity shocks, when liquidity is sufficiently scarce, Cour...

We formulate a consumption-based asset pricing model in which aggregate risk aversion is time-varying in response to both news about consumption growth (as in a habit formation model) and news about inflation. We estimate our model and explore its pricing implications for the term structure of interest rates and the cross-section of stock returns. Our empirical results support the hypothesis th...