This paper reports measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These measures are based on survey responses to hypothetical situations constructed using an economic theorist's concept of the underlying parameters. The individual measures of preference parameters display heterogeneity. Estimated risk tolerance and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution are essentially uncorrelated across individuals. Measured risk tolerance is positively related to risky behaviors, including smoking, drinking, failing to have insurance, and holding stocks rather than Treasury bills. These relationships are both statistically and quantitatively significant, although measured risk tolerance explains only a small fraction of the variation of the studied behaviors. Robert B. Barsky F. Thomas Juster Miles S. Kimball Matthew D. Shapiro Survey Research Center and Department of Economics University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tel. 313 ...

We model consumption and dividend growth rates as containing (i) a small long-run predictable component and (ii) fluctuating economic uncertainty (consumption volatility). These dynamics, for which we provide empirical support, in conjunction with Epstein and Zin’s (1989) preferences, can explain key asset markets phenomena. In our economy, financial markets dislike economic uncertainty and better long-run growth prospects raise equity prices. The model can justify the equity premium, the risk-free rate, and the volatility of the market return, risk-free rate, and the price-dividend ratio. As in the data, dividend yields predict returns and the volatility of returns is time-varying.

This paper considers the business cycle, asset pricing, and welfare effects of increased risk aversion, while holding intertemporal substitution preferences constant. I show that increasing risk aversion does not significantly affect the relative variabilities and co-movements of aggregate quantity variables. At the same time, it dramatically improves the model's asset market predictions. The welfare costs of business cycles increase when preference parameters are chosen to match financial data.

This paper examines the effects of uncertainty about the stock return predictability on optimal dynamic portfolio choice in a continuous time setting for a long horizon investor. Uncertainty about the predictive relation affects the optimal portfolio choice through dynamic learning, and leads to a state-dependent relation between the optimal portfolio choice and the investment horizon. There is substantial market timing in the optimal hedge demands, which is caused by stochastic covariance between stock return and dynamic learning. The opportunity cost of ignoring predictability or learning is found to be quite substantial. How much should a “long horizon ” investor allocate to equity? The conventional wisdom says that a long horizon investor should invest more in equity because, over long horizons, aboveaverage returns tend to offset below-average returns. This is the notion of “time diversification.” Samuelson (1989, 1990), among others, has argued that the notion of “time diversification ” is spurious: when stock returns are i.i.d., for example, the optimal portfolio is independent of the horizon for an investor with an isoelastic utility function. When stock returns are predictable, however, the optimal stock allocation does depend on the investment horizon, even if the investor has an isoelastic utility.

We study a Lucas asset pricing model that is standard in all respects, except that the representative agent’s subjective beliefs about endowment growth are distorted. Using constant-relative-risk-aversion utility, with relative risk aversion coefficient below ten, and fluctuating beliefs that exhibit pessimism over expansions and optimism over contractions, our model is able to match the first and second moments of the equity premium and risk–free rate, as well as the persistence and predictability of excess returns found in the data.

and Nancy Stokey for useful criticisms of earlier drafts. We are grateful to Wen-Fang Liu for excellent research assistance. We thank two referees of an earlier draft for comments that prompted an extensive reorientation of our research. Robust Permanent Income and Pricing \::: I suppose there exists an extremely powerful, and, if I may so speak, malignant being, whose whole endeavors are directed toward deceiving me. " Rene Descartes, Meditations, II. 1 1.

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Friedman and Schwartz hypothesized that the Great Depression created exaggerated fears of economic instability. We quantify their idea by using a robustness calculation to shatter a representative consumer’s initial confidence in the parameters of a two-state Markov chain that truly governs consumption growth. The assumption that the consumption data come from the true Markov chain and the consumer’s use of Bayes ’ law cause that initial pessimism to wear off. But so long as it persists, the representative consumer’s pessimism contributes a volatile multiplicative component to the stochastic discount factor that would be measured by a rational expectation econometrician. We study how this component affects asset prices. We find settings of our parameters that make pessimism wear off slowly enough to allow our model to generate substantial values for the market price of risk and the equity premium. Key words: Robustness, learning, asset pricing. 1

We uncover a significant negative correlation between various volatility measures and private investment in developing countries, even when adding the standard control variables. No such correlation is uncovered when the investment measure is the sum of private and public investment spending. Indeed, public investment spending is positively correlated with some measures of volatility. These findings suggest that the detrimental impact of volatility on investment may be easier to detect using disaggregated data. We provide several possible interpretations for our findings. Nonlinearities in preferences or budget constraints can cause volatility to have first-order negative effects on private investment.

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