During recession, many macroeconomic variables display higher levels of volatility. We show how introducing an AR(1)-ARCH(1) driving process into the canonical Lucas consumption CAPM framework can account for the empirically observed greater volatilty of asset returns during recessions. In particular, agents' joint forecasting of levels and time-varying second moments transforms symmetric-volat...

This paper describes and analyses the history of the fundamental equation of modern financial economics: the Black-Scholes (or Black-Scholes-Merton) option pricing equation. In that history, several themes of potentially general importance are revealed. First, the key mathematical work was not rule-following but bricolage, creative tinkering. Second, it was, however, bricolage guided by the goa...

Implicit in the prices of traded nancial assets are Arrow-Debreu prices or, with continuous states, the state-price density (SPD). We construct a nonparametric estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive its asymptotic sampling theory. This estimator provides an arbitrage-free method of pricing new, complex, or illiquid securities while capturing those features of the data that a...

This paper builds on the landmark contribution of Glosten (1994) by treating the determination of limit order supply schedules as an exercise in asset pricing theory with the possible sizes of incoming market orders as the value-relevant states of nature, yielding an analogue of the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing. State prices and price impact prove to be proportional to the slope of the ...

Is Beta Dead?” (Wallace [1980]) and other recent articles have asked whether broad consequences, disastrous to modern investment technology, would result from misspecification of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), or worse yet, from falsehood of the model. The criticisms have cited imprecise specification of the market portfolio as a misapplication of the CAPM, and have emphasized the diff...

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...

By exploiting the structural tax rate changes created by the Bush-era tax acts in 2001 and 2003, this study offers a first direct investigation of how the differential taxation of financial assets affects households’ asset location and allocation into taxable and tax-deferred accounts in a natural experimental framework. Because bonds are heavily taxed assets, relative to stocks, and tax treatm...

We study the relative risk of value and growth stocks. We find that time-varying risk goes in the right direction in explaining the value premium. Value betas tend to covary positively, and growth betas tend to covary negatively with the expected market risk premium. Our inference differs from that of previous studies because we sort betas on the expected market risk premium, instead of on the ...

In this paper, we develop a new capital adequacy buffer model (CABM) which is sensitive to dynamic economic circumstances. The model, which measures additional bank capital required to compensate for fluctuating credit risk, is a novel combination of the Merton structural model, which measures distance to default, and the timeless capital asset pricing model (CAPM) which measures additional ret...