Estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution with leverage

Following the recent literature on intermediary asset pricing models, this paper argues that the marginal utility of wealth of financial intermediaries can be used to generate enough volatility and counter-cyclicality on the recursive preference-based stochastic discount factor. Hence, a dynamic econometric strategy of an asset pricing model with the market portfolio return and the leverage growth of financial intermediaries allows for a sensible economic estimate of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. On the contrary, the same framework with alternative measures of consumption produces extremely poor economic results.