The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

Thanks to a combination of scientific advances and economic incentives, the development of therapeutics to treat rare or “orphan” diseases has grown dramatically in recent years. With the advent of FDA-approved gene therapies and the promise of gene editing, many experts believe we are at an...

We quantify the financial performance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) portfolios in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, based on data from six major ESG rating agencies. We document statistically significant excess returns in ESG portfolios from 2014 to 2020 in the U.S. and Japan. We...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

The portfolio approach of financing drug development has been proposed as a financial innovation to improve the risk/return tradeoff of investment in drug development projects through the use of diversification and securitization. By investing in a sizable and well-diversified portfolio of novel...

The case for investing in fusion energy has never been greater, given increasing global energy demand, high annual carbon dioxide output, and technological limitations for wind and solar power. Nevertheless, financing for fusion companies through traditional means has proven challenging. While...

The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

Systemic risk is commonly used to describe the possibility of a series of correlated defaults among financial institutions - typically banks - that occur over a short period of time, often caused by a single major event. However, since the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, it has...