The option pricing model has been the work horse in the development of financial economics ever since the seminal papers by Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973). Here, the arbitrage free prices of equity options were derived in closed form. Apart from the price of the underlying asset and contractual terms (strike

We develop a new empirical approach to term structure analysis that allows testing for time-varying risk premiums and arbitrage opportunities in models with both unobservable factors and factors identified as the innovations to observed macroeconomic variables. Factors can play double roles as both covariance-generating common shocks driving yields and determinants of market prices of risk in cross-sectional pricing. The evidence favors time-varying risk prices significantly related to the second Stock–Watson principal component of macroeconomic variables and to changes in the industrial production index. Our preferred specification includes these two observable and two unobservable factors, with the no-arbitrage condition imposed.

Statistical analysis of the job-search model has isolated the role played by the minimum observed wage in identifying and estimating behavioral parameters. Estimators based on order statistics, however, are influenced by measurement error in ways that estimators based on averages are not, and there is ample evidence that wage data contain measurement errors. We propose a model in which worker behavior is captured by the prototypal search model but wages are observed with error.

Recent empirical evidence demonstrates the presence of an important long-memory component in realized asset return volatility. We specify and estimate multivariate models for the joint dynamics of stock returns and volatility that allow for long memory in volatility without imposing this property on returns. Asset pricing theory imposes testable cross-equation restrictions on the system that are not rejected in our preferred specifications, which include a strong financial leverage effect. We show that the impact of volatility shocks on stock prices is small and short lived, in spite of a positive risk-return tradeoff and long memory in volatility.

Using high-frequency intraday futures prices to measure yield volatility at selected maturities, we find that daily yield curves carry incremental information about future interest rate risk at the long end, relative to that contained in the time series of historical volatilities. Some of the information in the yield curves is not captured by standard affine models. Our results point to the existence of an unspanned volatility factor. Both time series and yield curve based forecasts provide utility to a risk averse investor, relative to a random walk. Information from the two sources can be combined to enhance yield volatility forecasting performance.

The article structually estimates an on‐the‐job search model of job separations. Given each employer pays observably equivalent workers the same but wages are dispersed across employers, an employer's separation flow is the sum of an exogenous outflow unrelated to the wage and a job‐to‐job flow that decreases with the employer's wage. Using data from the Danish Integrated Database for Labour Market Research, the empirical results imply, as predicted by theory, that search effort declines with the wage. Furthermore, the estimates explain the employment effect, defined as the horizontal difference between the distribution of wages earned and the wage offer distribution.