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American Economic Review Vol. 101 No. 3 2011

Disasterization: A Simple Way to Fix the Asset Pricing Properties of Macroeconomic Models

Xavier Gabaix

NYU Stern, 44 W. 4th St, New York NY 10012.

Abstract

A central difficulty in economics is to create a model with both good business cycle properties and asset pricing properties. I show how to solve this difficulty by a simple portable modeling device: the “disasterization” of models. Take an economy with good business cycle properties and create a new, “disasterized” economy, which is essentially identical to the original one except that disasters can destroy part of the capital stock and productivity. In such a disasterized economy, asset prices exhibit high and volatile risk premia, but macro variables remain unchanged. Perturbations of this benchmark allow for feedback from finance to macro.

DOI
10.1257/aer.101.3.406
Volume
101
Issue
3
Pages
406-409
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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