John H. Cochrane

Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow
Biography: 

John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson 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

Featured

The Clinton Plan’s Growth Deficit

by John H. Cochranevia Wall Street Journal
Thursday, August 11, 2016

Hillary’s agenda is long on economic platitudes. How is more money for roads—$50 billion a year—going to kick-start growth?

Featured

Summers On Growth And Stimulus

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Larry Summers has an important, and 95% excellent, Financial Times column. Larry is especially worth listening to. I can't imagine that if not a main Hilary Clinton adviser he will surely be an eminence grise on its economic policies. He's saying loud and clear what they are, so far, not: Focus on growth.

Featured

A World Without Cash

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Monday, August 8, 2016

Max Raskin and David Yermack have a nice WSJ OpEd last week, "Preparing for a world without cash." The oped summarizes their related paper. 

Featured

A Look In The Mirror

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Thursday, August 4, 2016

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have written a splendid article, "A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation’s Role in Economic Research" in the summer Journal of Economic Perspectives. Many of their points apply to research support in general.

Analysis and Commentary

Federalization Of Labor

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, August 2, 2016

The news here is that serious economists are advocating these policies, not just to transfer income from one to another, reduce inequality, help specific groups, or enhance some sense of social justice, at the expense of dynamism and growth, but that more Federal control of the labor market will increase wages, productivity and economic growth for everyone!

Analysis and Commentary

Macro-Finance

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Thursday, July 28, 2016

A new essay "Macro-Finance," based on a talk I gave at the University of Melbourne this Spring. I survey many current frameworks including habits, long run risks, idiosyncratic risks, heterogenous preferences, rare disasters, probability mistakes, and debt or institutional finance. 

Analysis and Commentary

How To Step On A Rake

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Wednesday, July 27, 2016

How to step on a rake is a little note on how to solve Chris Sims' stepping on a rake paper.

Analysis and Commentary

Blueprint For America

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Tuesday, July 12, 2016

"Blueprint for America" is a collection of essays, organized, edited and inspired by George P. Shultz. You can get an overview and chapter by chapter pdfs online. The hardcover will be available from Amazon or Hoover Press October 1.

Analysis and Commentary

Immigration Sentiment

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Saturday, July 9, 2016

A common story says that opposition to immigration comes from people in high-immigrant communities, who suffer externalities from the presence of many immigrants. It is not true.

Housing
Featured

NYT On Zoning

by John H. Cochranevia Grumpy Economist
Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Conor Dougherty in The New York Times has a good article on zoning laws.

Pages

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. . .