Since the mid-1990s, negative stock returns comove with downgrades to the Fed’s growth expectations and predict policy accommodations. Textual analysis of FOMC documents reveals that policy makers pay attention to the stock market. The primary mechanism is their concern with the consumption wealth effect, with a secondary role for the market predicting the economy. We find little evidence of the Fed overreacting to the market in an ex post sense (reacting beyond the market’s effect on growth expectations). Although policy makers are aware that the Fed put could induce risk-taking, moral hazard considerations appear not to significantly affect their decision-making ex ante.

The consumption of high-consumption households is more exposed to fluctuations in aggregate consumption and income than that of low-consumption households in the Consumer Expenditure (CEX) Survey. The exposure to aggregate consumption growth of households in the top 10 percent of the consumption distribution in the CEX is about five times that of households in the bottom 80 percent. Given real aggregate per capita consumption growth about 3 percentage points less than its historical mean during the past year, these figures predict that the ratio of consumption of the top 10 percent to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by about 15 percentage points (relative to trend). Using income data from Piketty and Saez (2003), we show that the income (especially the wage income) of rich households is more exposed to aggregate fluctuations, so their higher income exposure is a likely contributor to their higher consumption exposure. Finally, we find a striking change in the exposure of the incomes of high-income households: prior to the early 1980's, the incomes of high-income households were not more exposed to aggregate fluctuations. Thus, while high-income households currently bear an inordinately large share of aggregate fluctuations, this is a recent occurrence.

We document the return to investing in U.S. nonpublicly traded equity. Entrepreneurial investment is extremely concentrated, yet despite its poor diversification, we find that the returns to private equity are no higher than the returns to public equity. Given the large public equity premium, it is puzzling why households willingly invest substantial amounts in a single privately held firm with a seemingly far worse risk-return trade-off. We briefly discuss how large nonpecuniary benefits, a preference for skewness, or overestimates of the probability of survival could potentially explain investment in private equity despite these findings.

We document that since 1994, the equity premium is earned entirely in weeks 0, 2, 4, and 6 in Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) cycle time, that is, even weeks starting from the last FOMC meeting. We causally tie this fact to the Fed by studying intermeeting target changes, Fed funds futures, and internal Board of Governors meetings. The Fed has affected the stock market via unexpectedly accommodating policy, leading to large reductions in the equity premium. Evidence suggests systematic informal communication of Fed officials with the media and financial sector as a channel through which news about monetary policy has reached the market.

The paper presents empirical evidence based on the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey that accounting for limited asset market participation is important for estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. Differences in estimates of the EIS between asset holders and non–asset holders are large and statistically significant. This is the case whether estimating the EIS on the basis of the Euler equation for stock index returns or the Euler equation for Treasury bills, in each case distinguishing between asset holders and non–asset holders as best as possible. Estimates of the EIS are around 0.3–0.4 for stockholders and around 0.8–1 for bondholders and are larger for households with larger asset holdings within these two groups.

Why don't VCs eliminate excess demand for follow-on funds by raising fees? We propose a model of learning that leads to informational holdup. Current investors learn about skill whereas outside investors observe only returns. This gives current investors holdup power when the VC raises his next fund: Without their backing, no-one will fund him, as outside investors interpret the lack of backing as a sign of low skill. Holdup power diminishes the VC's ability to increase fees in line with performance, leading to return persistence. Empirical evidence supports the model. We estimate that up to two-thirds of VC firms lack skill.

We present a theory in which the key driver of short-term debt issued by the financial sector is the portfolio demand for safe and liquid assets by the nonfinancial sector. This demand drives a premium on safe and liquid assets that the financial sector exploits by owning risky and illiquid assets and writing safe and liquid claims against them. The central prediction of the theory is that safe and liquid government debt should crowd out financial sector lending financed by short-term debt. We verify this prediction with US data from 1875 to 2014. We take a series of approaches to rule out standard crowding out via real interest rates and to address potential endogeneity concerns.

We provide new evidence on the success of long-run risks in asset pricing by focusing on the risks borne by stockholders. Exploiting microlevel household consumption data, we show that long-run stockholder consumption risk better captures cross-sectional variation in average asset returns than aggregate or nonstockholder consumption risk, and implies more plausible risk aversion estimates. We find that risk aversion around 10 can match observed risk premia for the wealthiest stockholders across sets of test assets that include the 25 Fama and French portfolios, the market portfolio, bond portfolios, and the entire cross-section of stocks.

Investors value the liquidity and safety of US Treasuries. We document this by showing that changes in Treasury supply have large effects on a variety of yield spreads. As a result, Treasury yields are reduced by 73 basis points, on average, from 1926 to 2008. Both the liquidity and safety attributes of Treasuries are driving this phenomenon. We document this by analyzing the spread between assets with different liquidity (but similar safety) and those with different safety (but similar liquidity). The low yield on Treasuries due to their extreme safety and liquidity suggests that Treasuries in important respects are similar to money.

Stock-Market Participation, Intertemporal Substitution, and Risk-Aversion by Annette Vissing-Jørgensen and Orazio P. Attanasio. Published in volume 93, issue 2, pages 383-391 of American Economic Review, May 2003