This paper documents new stylized facts about returns and cashflow growth rates on stocks and housing over decade-long holding periods. While cashflow growth rates on the two assets comove positively, their returns comove negatively until the Global Financial Crisis and positively thereafter. These facts present a puzzle for representative-agent models that imply positive return comovement for assets with similar cashflows. I consider a heterogeneous-agent model with segmented stock and housing markets connected through credit. News about the aggregate economy generates negative return comovement. Recent shifts such as wealthier homebuyers and institutional housing purchases reduce the importance of credit and segmentation.
Real-world contracts are typically private, observed only by their direct signatories, so agents working together are vulnerable to the principal opportunistically reducing other agents' incentives. The principal can mitigate this commitment problem by giving the most skilled agent a budget and delegating authority to write other agents' contracts. This endogenous hierarchy, never optimal with public contracts, raises effort, output, and compensation but allows rent extraction. The principal prefers it when contracts are opaque enough, skill is sufficiently heterogeneous across agents, and joint output is sensitive enough to effort. Our model provides novel predictions for the structure of banking syndicates.
We study supply-and-demand effects in the U.S. Treasury bill market by comparing the returns on T-bills to the policy rate on the Federal Reserve's reverse repurchase (RRP) facility. We develop and test a simple model where the RRP-bill spread is policed both by heterogeneously elastic money funds and by corporate treasurers who derive collateral benefits from holding T-bills. In response to shifts in T-bill supply, money funds act as front-line arbitrageurs. However, when T-bills become extremely scarce, less elastic corporate treasurers become the marginal investors and supply shifts have a larger effect on T-bill rates.
Young firms' contribution to aggregate employment has been underwhelming. We show that a similar trend is not apparent, however, in their contribution to aggregate sales or stock market capitalization, implying that these firms have exhibited a high average-to-marginal revenue product of labor. We study the implications of a gradual shift in the average-to-marginal revenue product of labor within a model of dynamic firm heterogeneity. We show that this shift provides (i) a unified explanation for several aspects of the decline in dynamism and (ii) a possible explanation for why large declines in young-firm employment may have only a moderate effect on aggregate output and consumption.
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