This study investigates whether personal taxes are related to asset valuations. The effective tax rate of investment income fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced. The main result of the paper demonstrates that there is an economically and statistically significant relationship between asset valuations and personal tax rates. Stock valuations tend to be higher when t...

This article combines an orientation to credit risk modeling with an introduction to affine Markov processes, which are particularly useful for financial modeling. We emphasize corporate credit risk and the pricing of credit derivatives. Applications of affine processes that are mentioned include survival analysis, dynamic term-structure models, and option pricing with stochastic volatility and...

For a market with an atomless continuum of assets, we formulate the intuitive idea of a ‘‘well-diversified’’ portfolio, and present a notion of ‘‘exact arbitrage’’, strictly weaker than the more conventional notion of ‘‘asymptotic arbitrage’’, and necessary and sufficient for the validity of an APT pricing formula. Our formula involves ‘‘essential’’ risk, one based on a specific index portfolio...

Tax rates have fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced in the U.S. in 1913. This paper analyzes the effects of stochastic taxation on asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Stochastic taxation affects the after-tax returns of both risky and safe assets. Whenever taxes change, bond and equity prices adjust to clear the asset markets. These price adjustmen...

This paper investigates whether investors are compensated for the tax burden of equity securities. Effective tax rates on equity securities vary over time due to frequent tax reforms and cross-sectionally due to persistent differences in propensities to pay dividends. The paper finds an economically and statistically significant relationship between risk-adjusted stock returns and effective per...

Inventory positions of two risk averse market makers are introduced into a Kyle (1985) type batch trading model and the effects are analyzed. An equilibrium is defined with participation constraint and incentive compatibility and it is characterized as γ-coalitional equilibrium. At the equilibrium the two market makers share the risk of clearing orders so that the aggregate pricing schedule bec...

This paper concerns the effects of macroeconomic announcements on the covariance structure of US government bond returns for six different maturities; the study shows that the conditional variances, covariances, and correlation coefficients are significantly greater on announcement days. On non-announcement days, the correlation coefficients are relatively large and are greater the closer the b...

Emerging markets exhibit high returns to capital, the ‘Lucas Paradox,’ alongside volatile growth rate regimes. We investigate the role of long-run risks, i.e., risk due to fluctuations in economic growth rates, in leading to return differentials across countries. We take the perspective of a US investor and outline an empirical strategy to identify risky growth shocks and quantify their implica...

We consider an exchange economy under uncertainty, in which agents’ utility functions exhibit constant absolute risk aversion, but they may be recursive and the expected utility calculation may be based on multiple subjective beliefs. The risk aversion coefficients, subjective beliefs, subjective time discount factors, initial endowments, and tradeable assets may differ across agents. We prove ...

We model elasticity of volatility as a stochastic process with an eye to merge popular constant elasticity of variance (CEV) and stochastic volatility (SV) models in order to understand when it is appropriate to use absolute or relative changes or some intermediate transformation as well as to compare with more traditional autoregressive exponential stochastic volatility formulations. We descri...