This paper considers a consumption-based asset pricing model where housing is explicitly modeled both as an asset and as a consumption good. Nonseparable preferences describe households' concern with composition risk, that is, fluctuations in the relative share of housing in their consumption basket. Since the housing share moves slowly, a concern with composition risk induces low frequency movements in stock prices that are not driven by news about cash flow. Moreover, the model predicts that the housing share can be used to forecast excess returns on stocks. We document that this indeed true in the data. The presence of composition risk also implies that the riskless rate is low which further helps the model improve on the standard CCAPM.

This paper considers a consumption-based asset pricing model where housing is explicitly modeled both as an asset and as a consumption good. Nonseparable preferences describe households' concern with composition risk, that is, fluctuations in the relative share of housing in their consumption basket. Since the housing share moves slowly, a concern with composition risk induces low frequency movements in stock prices that are not driven by news about cash flow. Moreover, the model predicts that the housing share can be used to forecast excess returns on stocks. We document that this indeed true in the data. The presence of composition risk also implies that the riskless rate is low which further helps the model improve on the standard CCAPM.

This paper provides new evidence about the link between firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) and stock returns. We estimate firm-level TFP and show that it is strongly related to several firm characteristics such as size, the book-to-market ratio, investment, and hiring rate. Low productivity firms earn a significant premium over high productivity firms in the following year, and this premium is countercyclical. We show that a production-based asset pricing model calibrated to match the cross section of measured firm-level TFPs can replicate the empirical relationship between TFP, many firm characteristics, and stock returns. Our results offer an explanation as to how these firm characteristics rationally predict returns. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

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