I study the asset pricing implications of the quality of public information about persistent productivity shocks in a general equilibrium model with Kreps–Porteus preferences. Low information quality is associated with a high equity premium, a low volatility of consumption growth, and a low volatility of the risk‐free interest rate. The relationship between information quality and the equity premium differs from that in endowment economies. My calibration improves substantially upon the Bansal–Yaron model in terms of the moments of the wealth–consumption ratio and the return on aggregate wealth.

We propose a general equilibrium model to study the link between the cross section of expected returns and book-to-market characteristics. We model two primitive assets: value assets and growth assets that are options on assets in place. The cost of option exercise, which is endogenously determined in equilibrium, is highly procyclical and acts as a hedge against risks in assets in place. Consequently, growth options are less risky than value assets, and the model features a value premium. Our model incorporates long-run risks in aggregate consumption and replicates the empirical failure of the conditional capital asset pricing model (CAPM) prediction. The model also quantitatively accounts for the pattern in mean returns on book-to-market sorted portfolios, the magnitude of the CAPM-alphas, and other stylized features of the cross-sectional data.

This paper studies asset pricing and labor market dynamics when idiosyncratic risk to human capital is not fully insurable. Firms use long‐term contracts to provide insurance to workers, but neither side can fully commit; furthermore, owing to costly and unobservable retention effort, worker‐firm relationships have endogenous durations. Uninsured tail risk in labor earnings arises as a part of an optimal risk‐sharing scheme. In equilibrium, exposure to the tail risk generates higher aggregate risk premia and higher return volatility. Consistent with data, firm‐level labor share predicts both future returns and pass‐throughs of firm‐level shocks to labor compensation.

We extend the neoclassical investment model (Hayashi, 1982) to allow for limited commitment on compensation contracts. We consider three types of limited commitment: (i) managers cannot commit to compensation contracts that provide lower continuation utility than their outside options; (ii) shareholders cannot commit to negative net present value (NPV) projects; (iii) both the managers and the shareholders cannot commit. We characterize the optimal contract under general convex adjustment cost functions and provide examples for which closed-form solutions can be obtained. We show that, as in the data, small firms invest more, grow faster, and have a higher Tobin׳s Q than large firms under the optimal contract. In addition, the pattern of the dependence of chief executive officer (CEO) compensation on past performance implied by our model is also consistent with empirical evidence.

This paper develops a revealed preference theory for the equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre‐scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium. We provide a characterization theorem for the set of intertemporal preferences that generates a nonnegative announcement premium. Our theory establishes that the announcement premium identifies a significant deviation from time‐separable expected utility and provides asset‐market‐based evidence for a large class of non‐expected utility models. We also provide conditions under which asset prices may rise prior to some macroeconomic announcements and exhibit a pre‐announcement drift.

This paper develops an asset market-based test for preference for the timing of resolution of uncertainty. Our main theorem provides a characterization of preference for early resolution of uncertainty in terms of the risk premium realized during the period when the informativeness of macroeconomic announcements is resolved. Empirically, we find support for preference for early resolution of uncertainty based on evidence on the dynamics of the implied volatility of S&P 500 index options before Federal Open Market Committee announcements.

We develop an equilibrium model with moral hazard, which arises because some productivity shocks are privately observed by firm managers only. We characterize the optimal contract and its implications for firm size, growth, and managerial pay-performance sensitivity and exploit them to quantify the severity of the moral hazard problem. Our estimation suggests that unobservable shocks are relatively modest and account for about 10% of the total variation of firm output. Nonetheless, moral-hazard-induced incentive pay is quantitatively significant and accounts for 50% of managerial compensation. Eliminating moral hazard would result in about a 1% increase in aggregate output.

To understand the link between financial intermediation activities and the real economy, we build a general equilibrium model in which agency frictions in the financial sector affect the efficiency of capital reallocation across firms and generate aggregate economic fluctuations. We develop a recursive policy iteration approach to fully characterize the nonlinear equilibrium dynamics and the off-steady-state crisis behavior. In our model, adverse shocks to agency frictions exacerbate capital misallocation and manifest themselves as variations in total factor productivity at the aggregate level. Our model endogenously generates countercyclical volatility in the aggregate time series and countercyclical dispersion in the marginal product of capital and asset returns in the cross-section.

We develop a unified theory of dynamic contracting and assortative matching to explain firm dynamics. In our model, neither firms nor managers can commit to arrangements that yield lower payoffs than their outside options, which are microfounded by the equilibrium conditions in a matching market. The model endogenously generates power laws in firm size and CEO compensation, and explains differences in their right tails. We also show that our model quantitatively accounts for many salient features of the time‐series dynamics and the cross‐sectional distribution of firm investment, dividend payout, and CEO compensation.

We model investment options as intangible capital in a production economy in which younger vintages of assets in place have lower exposure to aggregate productivity risk. In equilibrium, physical capital requires a substantially higher expected return than intangible capital. Quantitatively, our model rationalizes a significant share of the observed difference in the average return of book-to-market-sorted portfolios (value premium). Our economy also produces (1) a high premium of the aggregate stock market over the risk-free interest rate, (2) a low and smooth risk-free interest rate, and (3) key features of the consumption and investment dynamics in the U.S. data.