Expectations and volatility of consumption and asset returns

We find that conditional means and variances of consumptiongrowth vary through time, and this variation appears to be associatedwith the business cycle. A pricing model with fluctuating meansand variances of consumption growth provides implications aboutconditional moments of returns for both short and long investmenthorizons, and these implications are explored empirically. TheU-shaped pattern of first-order autocorrelations of returns,as well as business cycle patterns in the price of risk, appearsto be consistent with the model, but our exploration suggeststhat other implications about conditional return moments areat odds with the data.