I identify a “slope” factor in the cross section of commodity futures returns: high-basis commodity futures have higher loadings on this factor than low-basis commodity futures. Combined with a level factor (an index of commodity futures), this slope factor explains most of the average excess returns of commodity futures portfolios sorted by basis. More importantly, I find that this factor is significantly correlated with investment shocks, which represent the technological progress in producing new capital. I investigate a competitive dynamic equilibrium model of commodity production to endogenize this correlation. The model reproduces the cross-sectional futures returns and many asset pricing tests.

We revisit Feldhütter and Schaefer (FS, 2018), who report evidence of a “credit spread puzzle” for high-yield but not investment-grade bonds. We show their results are reversed when their model is calibrated to market values of debt (as required by theory) rather than book values. We then demonstrate that using credit spreads rather than historical default rates to identify the default boundary provides the statistical power necessary to reject their assumption that firm dynamics follow geometric Brownian motion. A large market price of jump risk is required to match historical default rates, which generates a credit spread puzzle for investment-grade but not high-yield bonds.

Benchmark models that exogenously specify equity dynamics cannot explain the large spread in prices between put options written on individual banks and options written on the bank index during the financial crisis. However, theory requires that asset dynamics be specified exogenously and that endogenously determined equity dynamics exhibit a “leverage effect” that increases put prices by fattening the left tail of the distribution. The leverage effect is larger for puts on individual stocks than for puts on the index, thus increasing the basket-index spread. Time-series and cross-sectional variation in the leverage effect explains option prices well.