John Cochrane

John Cochrane held the AQR Capital Management Chair in Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School for many years before moving to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His textbook "Asset Pricing" (2001) is the standard graduate reference for asset pricing theory. He has written influential research on predictability of equity returns, the equity premium puzzle, consumption-based asset pricing, and the fiscal theory of the price level — his primary recent focus. Cochrane blogs at "The Grumpy Economist" and contributes to policy debates on monetary and fiscal policy. His fiscal theory of the price level — arguing that the price level is determined by the ratio of nominal government debt to the present value of expected future fiscal surpluses — offers a distinct and provocative alternative to conventional monetary theory that has generated significant debate among macroeconomists and central bank researchers.