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The Returns on Human Capital: Good News on Wall Street is Bad News on Main Street

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Author Info
Hanno Lustig
Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

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Abstract

We use a standard single-agent model to conduct a simple consumption growth accounting exercise. Consumption growth is driven by news about current and expected future returns on the market portfolio. The market portfolio includes financial and human wealth. We impute the residual of consumption growth innovations that cannot be attributed to either news about financial asset returns or future labor income growth to news about expected future returns on human wealth, and we back out the implied human wealth and market return process. This accounting procedure only depends on the agent's willingness to substitute consumption over time, not her consumption risk preferences. We find that innovations in current and future human wealth returns are negatively correlated with innovations in current and future financial asset returns, regardless of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The evidence from the cross-section of stock returns suggests that the market return we back out of aggregate consumption innovations is a better measure of market risk than the return on the stock market.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 11564.

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Date of creation: Aug 2005
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Publication status: published as Hanno Lustig & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2008. "The Returns on Human Capital: Good News on Wall Street is Bad News on Main Street," Review of Financial Studies, Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(5), pages 2097-2137, September.
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11564

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G1 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Akito Matsumoto, 2007. "The Role of Nonseparable Utility and Nontradeables in International Business Cycle and Portfolio Choice," IMF Working Papers 07/163, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
  2. Aoki, Shuhei & Kitahara, Minoru, 2008. "Measuring the Dynamic Cost of Living Index from Consumption Data," MPRA Paper 9802, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  3. Nicolas Coeurdacier & Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, 2008. "When bonds matter: home bias in goods and assets," Working Paper Series 2008-25, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. [Downloadable!]
  4. Borja Larrain & Motohiro Yogo, 2005. "Does firm value move too much to be justified by subsequent changes in cash flow?," Working Papers 05-18, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. Sydney Ludvigson, 2008. "The Research Agenda: Sydney Ludvigson on Empirical Evaluation of Economic Theories of Risk Premia," EconomicDynamics Newsletter, Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 9(2), April. [Downloadable!]
  6. Coeurdacier, Nicolas & Kollmann, Robert & Martin, Philippe, 2007. "International Portfolios with Supply, Demand and Redistributive Shocks," CEPR Discussion Papers 6482, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  7. Ricardo M. Sousa, 2007. "Wealth Shocks and Risk Aversion," NIPE Working Papers 28/2007, NIPE - Universidade do Minho. [Downloadable!]
  8. Chang, Yanqin, 2007. "high level of international risk sharing when the productivity growth contains long run risk," MPRA Paper 4476, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  9. Hanno Lustig & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh & Adrien Verdelhan, 2008. "The Wealth-Consumption Ratio," NBER Working Papers 13896, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  10. Xavier Gabaix & Augustin Landier, 2006. "Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much?," NBER Working Papers 12365, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  11. Luca Benzoni & Pierre Collin-Dufresne & Robert S. Goldstein, 2007. "Portfolio choice over the life-cycle when the stock and labor markets are cointegrated," Working Paper Series WP-07-11, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. [Downloadable!]
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