About me and this page

Welcome to my web page. Here you can find just about anything I've ever written.

The Short Bio has a few paragraphs describing me and my work. If you have to introduce me, please don't read it all. The Vita includes a chronological list of all papers, with links and citation information. The disclosure statement lists all outside activities and potential perceived conflicts.

The Research link will take you to all my academic writing, including published books, papers, working papers and comments. It includes comments and talks given at academic conferences. It also has information about my textbook, Asset Pricing

The News, Op-eds link takes you includes op-eds, blog posts, links to media coverage, slides and videos of talks, and other items of interest to the average non-academic.

I usually post slides of any talk I've given, so if there was some delicious graph you saw at a talk, you're likely to find it in the Research (for academic talks) or News (for other talks) links.

In December 2011 I started a blog with news and opeds and commentary.

Teaching takes you to class web pages. Students: these are the right web pages. Booth sometimes echoes old and out-of-date information to other sites. Visitors: you are welcome to use any of my materials that you find useful, so long as you cite their source. All: yes, the problem set answer links don't lead anywhere when I'm not teaching.

Data and Programs takes you to a webpage with data and programs for older papers. Starting 2011, I'm posting links to data and programs next to the paper on these pages, but I haven't yet cleaned up the old papers to that method.

If you're a sailplane pilot looking for Soaring writing, go to the soaring link. If you're an economist but flying gliders sounds a lot more interesting than whatever else brought you here, go ahead and take a look.

I'm a proud father and husband of a creative family. Check out the Family web page, with art, comics, animation, music, plus the famous Hippo pages. Warning: If you click this link you may not be back for an hour or two. My wife, Elizabeth Fama is a children's book author, elizabethfama.com is her web page and blog, her latest book is Monstrous Beauty. My daugher Sally is studying representational art at the Grand Central Academy in New York; Her paintings and blog are worth a detour.

This is (July 2011) a big web site redesign. Please let me know about inevitable bugs, broken links, etc.

What's new?

Articles and working papers

• A Brief Parable of Overdifferencing January 2012. This is a short note, showing how money demand estimation works very well in levels or long (4 year) differences, but not when you first-difference the data. It shows why we often want to run OLS with corrected standard errors rather than GLS or ML, and it cautions against the massive differencing, fixed effects and controls used in micro data. It's from a PhD class, but I thought the reminder worth a little standalone note.
• Inflation and Debt National Affairs 9 (Fall 2011). html An essay summarizing the threat of inflation from large debt and deficits. The danger is best described as a "run on the dollar." Future deficits can lead to inflation today, which the Fed cannot control. I also talk about the conventional Keynesian (Fed) and monetarist views of inflation, and why they are not equipped to deal with the threat of deficits. This essay complements the academic (equations) "Understanding Policy" article (see below) and the Why the 2025 budget matters today WSJ oped (see below)
• Discount rates Joural of Finance 66, 1047-1108 (August 2011). The video (including gracious roast by Raghu Rajan). The slides. Data and programs (zip file).
  My American Finance Association Presidential Address. Discount rate variation (equivalently expected returns, risk premiums) are now at the center of asset pricing questions, from bubbles to the nature of the crash. I survey theory and empirical work, and offer some hope that "macro" theories are relevant to big recent events.
• Determinacy and Identification with Taylor Rules. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 119, No. 3 (June 2011), pp. 565-615. Online Appendix B JSTOR link, including html, pdf, and online appendix.
  There are multiple equilibrium problems at the heart of the New-Keynesian model. This is a new update, including an updated treatment of Obstfeld and Rogoff (uncovering a surprising mistake) and many small improvements. This is the last pre-publication draft. It includes a technical appendix with algebra for determinacy regions and solutions of the three-equation New-Keynesian model, as well as other issues.
• Understanding fiscal and monetary policy in the great recession: Some unpleasant fiscal arithmetic. January 2011 European Economic Review 55 2-30 ScienceDirect Link
  Why there was a big recession; will we face inflation or deflation, can the Fed do anything about it in the face of looming deficits?
  

More Articles and Working Papers...  

News, Op-eds, Blog Posts, etc

• The Fed's Mission Impossible Wall Street Journal December 29 2011 (Local pdf) A review of the Fed's proposal (the press release) to regulate big banks -- and, soon, everyone else.
• A continent of bad ideas Bloomberg.com Business Class December 22 2011 local pdf. Latest on the euro. "... by artful application of bad ideas, Europe has taken a plain-vanilla sovereign restructuring and turned it into a banking crisis, a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, and now a political crisis.." New Italian version, thanks to Duccio Gasparri
• All the world's troubles in 10 minutes. December 2, 2011 Remarks at the Hoover Conference, "Restoring Robust Growth in America." Europe's crisis and how the economy is a garden, needing weeding not the latest fertilizer.
• What Political Compromises Could Create Jobs? November 9 2011 Planet Money Blog Post. Nothing coming out of Washington has a hope of "creating jobs" in the next year.
• Last Chance to Save the Euro Wall Street Journal September 29 2011 (WSJ link, requires subscription. ) The ECB is buying PIGS sovereign debt, and lending massively to banks who are buying sovereign debt, taking same debt as collateral. Current proposals essentially expand this bond buying a lot, but with smoke and mirrors so you don't see it. When defaults come, Germany will either have to pour euros into the ECB, validating the fait-accompli bailout, or watch the euro inflate. Everyone thinks that the euro can't survive sovereign default. No, allowing sovereign default is the way to preserve the euro.
• Apperance on Tom Keene's Bloomberg TV show. Fun.
• Bubble trouble Bloomberg View Septeber 22 2011. local pdf. Part of Booth's "Business Class" series. High price-dividend ratios mean low returns and vice versa. The "bubble" argument is only about understanding why risk premia vary over time. A short oped based on "Discount Rates"
• The More Capital, The Safer the Bank July 15 2011 Wall Street Journal. Local pdf. This piece counters many arguments for low bank capital requirements. Capital is not reserves, the required return on equity is lower for better capitalized banks. (Modigliani and Miller work at least a bit.) And no, Dodd-Frank does not mean banks are forever more free of risk.
  For more on bank capital requirements, see Anat Admati's Stanford website. Here's the source for quoting Dan Tarullo on more capital. The other side that I was making fun of: JP Morgan testimony and The Clearing House Open Letter. Here is the New York Times mixing up capital with reserves and stating as a fact -- not a quote, not a theory, not an opinion, just a undeniable fact -- that higher capital requirements mean less lending.
• In Defense of Hedgehogs July 15 2011 Cato Unbound. Local Pdf. A short essay on forecasting in economics and finance. Why "we can't forecast" doesn't mean "we don't know anything." The difference between unconditional forecasting -- "what will happen?" which we are not very good at, and conditional forecasting or "what will be the effect of x policy" which we are pretty good at. Most of all a defense of "hedgehogs" like Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, whose conditional forecasts stuck to a few clear core principle, as opposed to heterodox "foxes." It's a "reaction essay" to Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock's essay in the July 2011 Cato Unbound.
• Europe's Greek Stress Test June 17 2011.Wall Street Journal, with Anil Kashyap. Local pdf.
  Why is Europe so scared to let Greece reschedule just a bit? Answer: because their banks holding Greek debt. Greece isn't being bailed out -- they'd rather default than work a year and a half just to pay off old debts. Bondholders are being bailed out, and those are mostly banks. So much for the wonders of bank regulation. Europe needs to fix its banks pronto, because the sovereigns will default. The default doesn't have to imply a financial crisis.
• Is QE2 a Savior, Inflator or a Dud? June 3 2011. Bloomberg.com (Booth "Business Class" Series).Local copy.
  I think QE2 basically did nothing. The minor danger is we are slightly more prone to runs on the dollar. The big danger is the Fed is basically powerless.
• Why the 2025 budget matters today. Wall Street Journal April 27 2011.Local pdf copy
  Long term deficits and short term debt leave us vulnerable to a run on the dollar and stagflation. A simple summary of "Understanding policy in the great recession."
• Contagion and other Euro Myths Wall Street Journal Dec 2 2010. local pdf The latest on the unfolding sovereign debt crisis. Contagion is nonsense, and short term debt is a big part of the problem.

More News and Op-eds... now organized by subject,

European debt crisis
Current economic situation and policy
Asset markets
Financial crisis, Financial rgulation
Monetary policy; inflation, deficits, fiscal theory
Fiscal stimulus
Health insurance
General economics, philoisophical debates
Interviews and other media

Academic Talks and Comments

• The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and its Implications for Current Policy in the United States and Europe November 19, 2011 This is the text of my presentation at the concluding panel of the conference, “Fiscal Policy under Fiscal Imbalance,” hosted by the Becker-Friedman Institute and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
• Hedge Funds. November 3 2011. (Updated) Extensive slides for various talks about hedge funds. Returns, alphas, betas, fees, how to form portfolios of hedge funds.
• Hamilton, Wu, and QE2, March 3 2011. Comments on Jim Hamilton and Jing Wu, 2011, "The Effectiveness of Alternative Monetary Policy Tools in a Zero Lower Bound Environment", at the spring NBER Monetary Economics meeting, along with many thoughts and comments on quantitative easing more generally. Slides.
• New-Keynesian Models with Fiscal Price Determination. January 2011 Slides for presentation at the 2011 AEA meetings.
• Panel on the financial crisis (Video) January 2011. with Simon Johnson, Raghu Rajan, Rene Stulz, at the AFA meetings.
• A Skeptical Appraisal of Frictions in the Financial Crisis. September 2010. Notes and Pictures.

More talks and comments in Research talks and comments. ...

Copyright Notice

Materials provided are for educational use only. Published articles are the Copyright of their respective publishers. All other material is Copyright © John H. Cochrane. You're welcome to use any of my material for eductional or non-commercial use, provided it is in its original form, and I am recognized as its author. Please post links rather than post copies of the files, so that your users get any updates which I post here.

visitors since Nov 20 2009