John H. Cochrane

Cochrane is also a noted sailplane pilot who flies an ASW-27 with the callsign BB. He was a member of the US Team at the 2010 World Gliding Championships in Hungary.

Since 2008, Cochrane has appeared more extensively in the media as he contributed to the debate on the financial crisis. Paul Krugman criticized repeatedly his viewpoint on his blog and in a New York Times Magazine article, leading John Cochrane to write a response on his website, which was subsequently published in The Wall Street Journal.

In this vein, Cochrane's work has been to document some empirical patterns and offer some potential explanations. His 1999 Journal of Political Economy, with John Y. Campbell, develops a representative agent model with nonlinear habits that matches the high and volatile risk premium on stocks, the predictability of stock returns, etc. In several articles (1991 The Journal of Finance, 1996 Journal of Political Economy), he develops and tests a "production-based asset pricing model" based on the q-theory of investment.

Cochrane has served as head of the National Bureau of Economic Research asset pricing group, and was the editor of the Journal of Political Economy from 1998 to 2003. He was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2001, served as vice-president of the American Finance Association in 2008, and was elected president of this learned society for the 2010 term.

In two 1992 articles, Cochrane emphasized some features of asset prices which are difficult to account for, such as the predictability of equity returns, and the longterm equity premium. His more recent work, with Monika Piazzesi, studies bond markets. In particular, in a number of papers, Cochrane and Piazzesi study the predictability of bond returns.

Cochrane received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986, after having obtained a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1979 and having served as a junior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers (1982–1983). He was hired by the University of Chicago economics department in 1986 and moved to the business school in 1993. Prior to joining the Hoover Institution, he was the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

John Howland Cochrane (/ˈ k ɒ k r ən / ; born 26 November 1957) is an economist, specializing in financial economics and macroeconomics. He is a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.