A frictionless general equilibrium model featuring heterogeneous time-varying risk tolerance explains the business cycle dynamics of intermediary leverage, aggregate credit, and other asset markets’ facts. In booms, when risk tolerance is high, households borrow more and aggregate credit increases funded by higher intermediary debt. In recessions, credit contracts and intermediaries delever. Yet, their debt-to-equity ratios increase as equity drops when risk aversion increases. Because households borrow more or less as their risk tolerance increases or decreases, the intermediary’s balance sheet forecasts stock returns both in the time series and the cross section. Moreover, credit expansions correlate with negatively skewed stock returns, low credit spreads, and predict lower future returns.

Non-linear external habit persistence models, which feature prominently in the recent “equity premium” asset pricing and macroeconomics literature, generate counterfactual predictions in the cross-section of stock returns. In particular, we show that in the absence of cross-sectional heterogeneity in firms’ cash-flow risk, these models produce a “growth premium,” that is, stocks with high price-to-fundamental ratios command a higher premium than stocks with low price-to-fundamental ratios. This implication is at odds with the well-established empirical observation of a “value premium” in the cross-section of stock returns. Substantial heterogeneity in firms’ cash-flow risk yields both a value premium as well as most of the stylized facts about the cross-section of stock returns, but it generates a “cash-flow risk puzzle”: Quantitatively, value stocks have to have “too much” cash-flow risk compared to the data to generate empirically plausible value premiums.