This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work and on the trade-off between risk and return. Modern research seeks to understand the behavior of the stochastic discount factor ~SDF! that prices all assets in the economy. The behavior of the term structure of real interest rates restricts the conditional mean of the SDF, whereas patterns of risk premia restrict its conditional volatility and factor structure. Stylized facts about interest rates, aggregate stock prices, and cross-sectional patterns in stock returns have stimulated new research on optimal portfolio choice, intertemporal equilibrium models, and behavioral finance. This paper surveys the field of asset pricing. The emphasis is on the interplay between theory and empirical work. Theorists develop models with testable predictions; empirical researchers document “puzzles”—stylized facts that fail to fit established theories—and this stimulates the development of new theories. Such a process is part of the normal development of any science. Asset pricing, like the rest of economics, faces the special challenge that data are generated naturally rather than experimentally, and so researchers cannot control the quantity of data or the random shocks that affect the data. A particularly interesting characteristic of the asset pricing field is that these random shocks are also the subject matter of the theory. As Campbell, Lo, and MacKinlay ~1997, Chap. 1, p. 3! put it: What distinguishes financial economics is the central role that uncertainty plays in both financial theory and its empirical implementation. The starting point for every financial model is the uncertainty facing investors, and the substance of every financial model involves the impact of uncertainty on the behavior of investors and, ultimately, on mar-* Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Motivated by the behavior of asset prices, trading volume and price volatility during historical episodes of asset price bubbles, we present a continuous time equilibrium model where overconfidence generates disagreements among agents regarding asset fundamentals. With short-sale constraints, an asset owner has an option to sell the asset to other overconfident agents when they have more optimistic beliefs. As in Harrison and Kreps (1978), this re-sale option has a recursive structure, that is, a buyer of the asset gets the option to resell it. Agents pay prices that exceed their own valuation of future dividends because they believe that in the future they will find a buyer willing to pay even more. This causes a significant bubble component in asset prices even when small differences of beliefs are sufficient to generate a trade. In equilibrium, large bubbles are accompanied by large trading volume and high price volatility. Our model has an explicit solution, which allows for several comparative statics exercises. Our analysis shows that while Tobin’s tax can substantially reduce speculative trading when transaction costs are small, it has only a limited impact on the size of the bubble or on price volatility. We also give an example where the price of a subsidiary is larger than its parent firm. This paper was previously circulated under the title “Overconfidence, Short-Sale Constraints and Bubbles.”

Central banks now generally agree that conventional monetary aggregates are of little use as targets or even indicators for monetary policy, owing to the instability of money demand relations in economies with well-developed financial markets. But monetary theory has provided little guidance for the analysis of policies that are not formulated in terms of a path for the money supply, and a stable money demand relation is generally assumed as a central element of a theoretical analysis. This paper, instead, shows that it is possible to analyze equilibrium inflation determination without any reference to either money supply or demand, as long as one specifies policy in terms of a "Wicksellian" interest-rate feedback rule. The paper's central result is an approximation theorem, showing the existence, for a simple monetary model, of a well-behaved "cashless limit" in which the money balances held to facilitate transactions become negligible. The relations that determine equilib...

Maintaining price stability requires not only commitment to an appropriate monetary policy rule, but an appropriate fiscal policy rule as well. Ricardian equivalence does not imply that fiscal policy is irrelevant, except in the case of a certain class of policies ("Ricardian" policies). The role of fiscal developments in inflation determination under a non-Ricardian regime is illustrated through an analysis of the bond-price support regime of the 1940s. A monetary-fiscal regime with attractive properties would combine a "Taylor rule" for monetary policy with nominal-deficit targeting as a fiscal policy commitment. # O#cial text of the 2000 Money, Credit and Banking Lecture, presented at Ohio State University on May 1, 2000. I wish to thank Michael Bordo, Matt Canzoneri, Steve Cecchetti, Larry Christiano, John Cochrane, Paul Evans, Eduardo Loyo, Bennett McCallum, Helene Rey, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe and Chris Sims for helpful discussions, Gauti Eggertsson for research assistance...

Not necessarily. The fundamental value of a firm increases with uncertainty about average future profitability, and this uncertainty was unusually high in the late 1990s. We calibrate a stock valuation model that includes this uncertainty, and compute the level of uncertainty that is needed to match the observed Nasdaq valuations at their peak. This uncertainty seems plausible because it matches not only the high level but also the high volatility of Nasdaq stock prices. We also show that uncertainty about average profitability has the biggest effect on stock prices when the equity premium is low.

ABSTRACT: The efficient markets hypothesis implies that, in the presence of rational investors, bubbles cannot develop. We analyze the trading behavior of a sophisticated investor, a London goldsmith bank, during the South Sea bubble in 1720. The bank believed the stock to be overvalued, yet found it profitable not to attack the bubble. Detailed examination of daily transactions in the London stock market shows that “riding the bubble ” was a highly profitable strategy. These findings lend support to recent theoretical work arguing that predictable investor sentiment may prevent rational investors from attacking a bubble.

This paper proposes an autoregressive regime-switching model of stock price dynamics in which the process creates pricing bubbles in one regime while error-correction prevails in the other. In the bubble regime the stock price depends negatively on inflation. In the error-correction regime it depends on the price-dividend-ratio. We find that the probability of regime-switch depends on exogenous inflation and lagged price. The model is consistent with Shleifer and Vishny’s theoretical noise trader and arbitrageur model and Modigliani’s inflation illusion phenomenon. The results emphasize the importance of inflation and the price-dividend-ratio when assessing investment risk.

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This research owes an intellectual debt to a few good citizens of Stavropol, Russia, who showed me the many marvels of unbridled capitalism. I am grateful for a USAID grant through the Eurasia Foundation, which made possible the trip to Russia in 1993, and to Duke University for financing the trip in 1994. Klarita Sadiraj helped me understand the Albanian Ponzi schemes, while Oleg Mikhalev provided perspective on the Russian Ponzi schemes. Frank Acito, Sugato Bhattacharyya, Timothy Crack, Craig Holden, Rich Rosen, Richard Shockley, Gregg Udell and seminar participants at Indiana, Maryland and Wisconsin (Madison) provided many thoughtful comments. I am particularly grateful to Mukarram Attari This paper shows that transition economies are breeding grounds for Ponzi schemes. It details how an unscrupulous profit-maximizing promoter can design classical Ponzi schemes if the following conditions are met: a large public sector (the proportion of national wealth owned by the state is above a lower bound), ambiguous laws governing the transfer of property rights from the state to the citizen (victims of a failed Ponzi scheme may organize to use the state’s assets for a bailout, the probability of which occurring is above a lower bound), political connections (the probability of early termination of the Ponzi scheme by a regulator is below an upper bound) and an inexpensive access to citizens through mass-media (advertising