John H. Cochrane

Senior Fellow
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Biography: 

John H. Cochrane is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an adjunct scholar of the CATO Institute. 

Before joining Hoover, Cochrane was  a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and earlier at its Economics Department. Cochrane earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT and his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a junior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1982–83).

Cochrane’s recent publications include the book Asset Pricing and articles on dynamics in stock and bond markets, the volatility of exchange rates, the term structure of interest rates, the returns to venture capital, liquidity premiums in stock prices, the relation between stock prices and business cycles, and option pricing when investors can’t perfectly hedge. His monetary economics publications include articles on the relationship between deficits and inflation, the effects of monetary policy, and the fiscal theory of the price level. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, financial regulation, and other topics. He was a coauthor of The Squam Lake Report. His Asset Pricing PhD class is available online via Coursera. 

Cochrane frequently contributes editorial opinion essays to the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg.com, and other publications. He maintains the Grumpy Economist blog.

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Recent Commentary

Interest Rates
Analysis and Commentary

Floating Rates?

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, April 4, 2017

I was interested to read in the Financial Times, "Iceland weighs plan to peg krona to another currency":Iceland’s finance minister has admitted it is untenable for the country to maintain its own freely floating currency....Benedikt Johannesson told the Financial Times that the Nordic island of...

Analysis and Commentary

Consumption Vs. GDP

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Sunday, April 2, 2017

Random Critical Analysis has a really interesting blog post from a while ago, on the difference between consumption and income as measures of well being. The level of data analysis and detail on that blog is really impressive.

Analysis and Commentary

The Obamacare Unraveling

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Saturday, April 1, 2017

I usually leave Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman alone. If you haven't figured them out by now, you are beyond my help. In particular, Brad a few years ago made fun of me for "predicting" in 2013 that Obamacare exchanges would unravel due to adverse selection. I have so far  resisted the temptation to needle Brad about that as, well... the Obamacare exchanges unraveled due to adverse selection!

Featured

More Covered Interest Parity

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Thursday, March 30, 2017

Several correspondents were kind enough to send me additional work on covered interest parity. There are two big questions (and a third at the end): 1) what force pushes prices out of line? 2) what force stops arbitrageurs from taking advantage of it, and thereby pushing prices back in line?

Analysis and Commentary

More Good Finance Articles

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Friday, March 24, 2017

The February Issue of the Journal of Finance made it to the top of my stack, and it has a lot of good articles. The first two especially caught my attention, Who Are the Value and Growth Investors? by Sebastien Bertermeier, Larent Calvet, and Paolo Sodini, and Asset Pricing Without Garbage by Tim Kroencke. A review, followed by more philosophical thoughts.

Analysis and Commentary

Covered Interest Parity

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Monday, March 20, 2017

Here's how covered interest parity works. Think of two ways to invest money, risklessly, for a year. Option 1: buy a one-year CD (conceptually. If you are a bank, or large corporation you do this by a repurchase agreement). Option 2: Buy euros, buy a one-year European CD, and enter a forward contract by which you get dollars back for your euros one year from now, at a predetermined rate.

Featured

Trade Insight

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Saturday, March 18, 2017

Daniel Hannan, a (soon to be unemployed?) UK member of the European Parliament, writes insightfully about trade in the Saturday Wall Street Journal.

Featured

The Real Fed Issues

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The media are usually fixated on the angels on heads of pins question, will she or won't she raise rates 0.25%? As such Fed discussion misses many of the really important issues. Fed’s Challenge, After Raising Rates, May Be Existential by Eduardo Porter in the New York Times is an excellent counterexample and a nice primer on some of the really big issues facing the Federal Reserve -- and the nation -- going forward.

Featured

Capital Illogic

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, March 14, 2017

More Bank Capital Could Kill the Economy write Tim Congdon and the usually sensible Steve Hanke in today's Wall Street Journal.

Analysis and Commentary

Target The Spread

by John H. Cochrane via Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, March 7, 2017

What should the Federal Reserve do, to control inflation, given that nominal interest rate = real interest rate + expected inflation, and that real interest rates vary over time in ways that the Fed cannot directly observe?

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Current Online Courses

Asset Pricing, Part 1, via Coursera and the University of Chicago

This course is part one of a two-part introductory survey of graduate-level academic asset pricing. We will focus on building the intuition and deep understanding of how the theory works, how to use it, and how to connect it to empirical facts. This first part builds the basic theoretical and empirical tools around some classic facts. The second part delves more deeply into applications and empirical evaluation. Learn more. . .