While most models with financial market imperfections predict investment by financially constrained firms to be more sensitive to financial variables, contracting models argue that investment by such firms should be more sensitive to fundamental determinants of investment because fundamentals capture both investment opportunities and changes in the financial position. By first grouping U.S. man...

We show that the existence of momentum and contrarian profits imposes restrictions on stochastic discount factors used to price stocks in equity markets. For several widely used asset pricing models, we demonstrate that these restrictions imply testable forms of intertemporal dependence in macroeconomic fundamentals such as consumption growth rate. Extensive empirical analysis provides supporti...

A major puzzle in international finance is the well-documented inability of models based on monetary fundamentals to produce better out-of-sample forecasts of the nominal exchange rate than a naive random walk. While this literature has generally employed statistical measures of forecast accuracy, we investigate whether there is any economic value to the predictive power of monetary fundamental...

When ambiguity-averse investors process news of uncertain quality, they act as if they take a worst-case assessment of quality. As a result, they react more strongly to bad news than to good news. They also dislike assets for which information quality is poor, especially when the underlying fundamentals are volatile. These effects induce ambiguity premia that depend on idiosyncratic risk in fun...

Three of the papers examine the relationship between financial asset valuations and macroeconomic fundamentals. Hall tries to account for corporate equity valuations using fundamentals such as taxes, risk, and depreciation with mixed results. Bernanke and Kuttner also examine the fundamental determinants of equity prices, but they focus only on monetary policy surprises, which appear to have a ...

A restricted-orientation convex set, also called an O-convex set, is a set of points whose intersection with lines from some xed set is empty or connected. The notion of O-convexity generalizes standard convexity and orthogonal convexity. We explore some of the basic properties of O-convex sets in two and higher dimensions. We also study O-connected sets, which are restricted O-convex sets with...