The idea of representing choice under uncertainty as a trade-off between mean returns and some measure of risk or uncertainty is fundamental to the analysis of investment decisions. In this paper, we show that preferences can be characterized in this way, even in the absence of objective probabilities. We develop a model of uncertainty averse preferences that is based on a mean and a measure of...

The paper shows that turnover proxies for firm-specific uncertainty, not liquidity risk. I show that turnover is unrelated to several alternative measures of liquidity risk and that liquidity risk factors cannot explain why higher turnover predicts lower future returns. I show that, because high turnover firms have high uncertainty, high turnover firms beat the CAPM when aggregate volatility in...

In this paper we examine the link between stock market uncertainty and monetary policy in the US. There are strong arguments why central banks should account for stock market uncertainty in their strategy. Amongst others, they can maintain the functioning of financial markets and moderate possible economic downswings. To describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve Bank, augmented forward-looki...

We examine optimal and other monetary policies in a linear-quadratic setup with a relatively general form of model uncertainty, so-called Markov jump-linear-quadratic systems extended to include forward-looking variables and unobservable “modes.” The form of model uncertainty our framework encompasses includes: simple i.i.d. model deviations; serially correlated model deviations; estimable regi...

We study a continuous-time problem of optimal public good contribution under uncertainty for an economy with a finite number of agents. Each agent can allocate his wealth between private consumption and repeated but irreversible contributions to increase the stock of some public good. We study the corresponding social planner problem and the case of strategic interaction between the agents and ...

Within a unified framework, the author conducts an empirical investigation of dynamic interrelationships among inflation, inflation uncertainty, relative price dispersion, and output growth. Focusing on the Canadian industrial sector, the author finds weak evidence that inflation uncertainty rises with the level of inflation, with short-run inflation uncertainty minimized at a trend inflation r...

In this paper we examine the link between stock market uncertainty and monetary policy in the US. There are strong arguments why central banks should account for stock market uncertainty in their strategy. Amongst others, they can maintain the functioning of financial markets and moderate possible economic downswings. To describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve Bank, augmented forward-looki...

We examine optimal and other monetary policies in a linear-quadratic setup with a relatively general form of model uncertainty, so-called Markov jump-linear-quadratic systems extended to include forward-looking variables and unobservable “modes.” The form of model uncertainty our framework encompasses includes: simple i.i.d. model deviations; serially correlated model deviations; estimable regi...

This paper considers the joint problem of model estimation and implementation of monetary policy in the face of uncertainty regarding the process of structural change in the economy. We model unobserved structural change through time variation in the natural rates of interest and unemployment. We show that certainty equivalent optimal policies perform poorly when there is model uncertainty abou...

Using a standard factor decomposition of a panel of forecasts, we have shown that the forecast uncertainty from the standpoint of a policy maker can be expressed as the disagreement among forecasters plus the perceived variability of common aggregate shocks. Thus, the uncertainty of the average forecast is not the variance of the average forecast but rather the average of the variances of the i...