Title: Disasters and the Lucas orchard
Description: This dissertation consists of three chapters linked by a common thread, namely the impact of disasters on financial markets. In Chapter 1, I extend the Epstein-Zin-lognormal consumption-based asset-pricing model to allow for general i.i.d. consumption growth processes. Information about the higher moments--or, equivalently, cumulants--of consumption growth is encoded in the cumulant-generating function (CGF). The importance of higher cumulants is a double-edged sword: those model parameters which are most important for asset prices, such as disaster parameters, are also the hardest to calibrate. It is therefore desirable to make statements which do not require calibration of a consumption process. First, I use properties of the CGF to derive restrictions on the time-preference rate and elasticity of intertemporal substitution in terms of the equity premium, riskless rate, and consumption-wealth ratio. Second, I show that "good deal" bounds on the maximal Sharpe ratio can be used to derive restrictions on preference parameters without calibrating the consumption process. Third, given preference parameters, I calculate the welfare cost of uncertainty directly from mean consumption growth and the consumption-wealth ratio without having to estimate the amount of risk in the economy. Fourth, I analyze heterogeneous-agent models with jumps.

In Chapter 2, I investigate the properties of a continuous-time endowment economy in which a representative agent with power utility consumes the dividends of multiple assets. The assets are Lucas trees; a collection of Lucas trees is a Lucas orchard. Prices, expected returns, and interest rates are determined endogenously on the basis of exogenous dividends. The model replicates various features of the data. Assets with independent dividends exhibit comovement in returns. Jumps spread across assets. Assets with high price-dividend ratios have low risk premia. Small assets exhibit momentum. High yield spreads forecast high excess returns on long term bonds and on the market. Special attention is paid to the behavior of very small assets which, in the limit, may comove endogenously and hence earn positive risk premia even if their dividends are independent of the rest of the economy. In Chapter 3, I explore the long-run implications of the fundamental equation of asset pricing, which states that the expected time- and risk-adjusted cumulative return on any asset equals one at all horizons. I arrive, via a theorem of Kakutani, at an apparently paradoxical result: for a typical asset, the realized time- and risk-adjusted cumulative return tends to zero with probability one. As a special case, this result strengthens the familiar fact that the growth-optimal portfolio outperforms other assets at long horizons. The apparent paradox is resolved by a further result, which shows that the long-run value of a non-growth-optimal asset is driven by the possibility of extremely good news at the level of the individual asset or extremely bad news at the aggregate level.