Theory suggests that people facing higher uninsurable background risk buy more insurance against other risks that are insurable. This proposition is supported by Italian cross-sectional data. Its shown that the probability of purchasing casualty insurance increases with earnings uncertainty.

Insurance companies and pension funds are part of complex systems of private insurance and public social protection created to reduce the cost of economic hazards. In the current phase of the business cycle, with many OECD countries struggling with low economic growth, high public deficits and...

From a financial standpoint, the mechanics of the carry trade has been recently examined in Brunnermeier et al. (2009). They showed that shocks to interest rate differentials lead to carry trade activity and to significant reactions in the bilateral exchange rates vis-a-vis the US dollar that...

This paper investigates the relationship between futures prices and financial investments in derivatives of the main agricultural commodities. We first provide a broad picture of how these markets function and how they have evolved, showing that traders who deal mostly in commodity index...

Estimates of the real term structure for the euro area implied by French index-linked bonds are obtained by means of a smoothing spline methodology. The real term structure allows computation of the constant-maturity inflation compensation, which is compared with the surveyed inflation...

This paper uses the celebrated no-arbitrage affine Gaussian term structure model applied to index-linked and standard government bonds to derive expected inflation rates and inflation risk premia, in the euro area and in the US. Maximum likelihood estimates show that the model describes the...

Standard risk metrics tend to underestimate the true risks of hedge funds because of serial correlation in the reported returns. Getmansky, Lo, and Makarov(2004) derive mean, variance, Sharpe ratio, and beta formulae adjusted for serial correlation. Following their lead, we derive adjusted...

This paper analyzes the determinants of credit default swap spread changes for a large sample of US non-financial companies over the period between January 2002 and March 2009. In our analysis we use variables that the literature has found have an impact on CDS spreads and, in order to account...

We examine the effects of the government guarantee schemes for bank bonds adopted in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers demise to help banks retain access to wholesale funding. We describe the evolution and the pattern of bond issuance across countries to assess the effect of the schemes. Then...

In this paper, econometric techniques are employed to analyze the continuous and remarkable growth which has characterized international stock markets since 1995. The Campbell and Shiller dividend discount model, a dynamic version of Gordon's formula commonly employed by financial analysts to...