Author Description

This dissertation consists of four essays exploring how people form beliefs and make decisions in the financial markets and their implications for asset prices. Two common threads run through this dissertation: the persistence of key state variables and the less-than-fully-rational approach to economic decision-making.Chapter 1 studies how professional forecasts of interest rates across maturities respond to new information. I document that forecasts for short-term rates underreact to new information while forecasts for long-term rates overreact. I propose a new explanation based on "autocorrelation averaging,'' whereby, to limited cognitive processing capacity, forecasters' estimate of the autocorrelation of a given process is biased toward the average autocorrelation of all the processes they observe. Consistent with this view, I show that forecasters over-estimate the autocorrelation of the less persistent term premium component of interest rates and under-estimate the autocorrelation of the more persistent short rate component. A calibrated model quantitatively matches the documented pattern of misreaction. Finally, I explore the pattern's implication for asset prices by showing that an overreaction-motivated predictor, the realized forecast error for the 10-year Treasury yield, robustly predicts excess bond returns.Chapter 2, joint with Ye Li, generalizes an exponential-affine asset pricing model to show that the prices of dividend strips reveal the underlying state variables, and thus, strongly predict future market return and dividend growth. We derive and empirically show that expected dividend growth is non-persistent, under which condition the ratio of market price to short-term dividend price, "duration,'' reveals only expected returns information. Duration predicts annual market return with an out-of-sample of R2 19%, subsuming the price-dividend ratio's predictive power. After controlling for duration, the price-dividend ratio predicts dividend growth w