Editor’s Note: Introducing the Review Article “Perspectives on the Future of Asset Pricing”

Abstract

One of the ways by which a top journal like the Review of Financial Studies ( RFS ) can contribute to the field of finance is to highlight directions for future research. This is one of the key lines of feedback we received from members of the profession in a survey we conducted back in 2019. On top of publishing cutting-edge research, which is our core activity, the RFS has contributed over the years to identifying future directions in a series of conferences and special issues focused on specific — sometimes emerging — areas of research. Another possible channel is through review articles that reflect on recent developments in areas of finance and discuss perspectives for future research that come out of them. For this reason, I was delighted to hear from Ralph Koijen, one of our editors, that he was involved in a panel at the National Bureau of Economic Research ( NBER ) discussing perspectives on the future of asset pricing. Asset pricing is one of the core areas of finance. In recent years, it has gone through some key transformations that extended its scope and highlighted new dimensions of exploration. The eight participants in the panel—Markus Brunnermeier, Emmanuel Farhi, Ralph Koijen, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Sydney Ludvigson, Hanno Lustig, Stefan Nagel, and Monika Piazzesi—are leading scholars in the field representing different strands of research in it. I thus invited them to summarize their thoughts, as reflected in the panel, about recent developments and perspectives for future research in a short review article written for the RFS .