Macro-Finance

A new essay "Macro-Finance," based on a talk I gave at the University of Melbourne this Spring. I survey many current frameworks including habits, long run risks, idiosyncratic risks, heterogenous preferences, rare disasters, probability mistakes, and debt or institutional finance. I show 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.