Macro-Finance
2017. Review of Finance 21(3): 945-985. Links: Publisher (doi) , Last manuscript. This is a review paper. I survey many current frameworks including habits, long run risks, idiosyncratic risks, heterogenous preferences, rare disasters, probability mistakes, and debt or institutional finance. I stress how all these approaches produce quite similar results and mechanisms: the market's ability to bear risk varies over time, with business cycles. I speculate with some simple models that time-varying risk premiums can produce a theory of risk-averse recessions, produced by varying risk aversion and precautionary saving, rather than Keynesian flow constraints or new-Keynesian intertemporal substitution. The July 2016 manuscript contains a long section with thoughts on how to make a macro model based on time varying risk premiums, that got cut from the above final version. (This is the "manuscript" referenced in the paper.) The Data and programs (zip, matlab). The slides for the talk. A very nice post on the Review of Finance Blog summarizing the paper, by Alex Edmans, the editor. Typo: equation (17) is wrong. The same equation, (3) is right.