Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities notably, central banks focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of aggregate...

This paper deals with the estimation of the risk-return trade-off. We use a MIDAS model for the conditional variance and allow for possible switches in the risk-return relation through a Markov-switching specification. We find strong evidence for regime changes in the risk-return relation. This...

We examine nine changes in the New York State Security Transaction Taxes (STT) between 1932 and 1981. We find that imposing or increasing an STT results in wider bidask spreads, lower volume, and increased price impact of trades. In contrast to theories of STT imposition as a means to reduce...

Understanding the nature of credit risk has important implications for financial stability. Since authorities—notably, central banks—focus on risks that have systemic implications, it is crucial to develop ways to measure these risks. The difficulty lies in finding reliable measures of...

The authors use the efficient hedging methodology for optimal pricing and hedging of equitylinked life insurance contracts whose payoff depends on the performance of several risky assets. In particular, they consider a policy that pays the maximum of the values of <em>n</em> risky assets at some maturity...

This paper investigates high-frequency (HF) market and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury market around major macroeconomic news announcements. BrokerTec introduced i-Cross at the end of 2007 and we use this exogenous event as an instrument to analyze the impact of HF activities on liquidity and...

The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called...

We develop a finite-sample procedure to test for mean-variance efficiency and spanning without imposing any parametric assumptions on the distribution of model disturbances. In so doing, we provide an exact distribution-free method to test uniform linear restrictions in multivariate linear...

Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities' payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. A three funds separation theorem...

This paper studies the impact of international capital flows on asset prices through risk premia. We investigate whether foreign purchases of U.S. Treasury securities significantly contributed to the decline in excess returns on long-term bonds between 1995 and 2008. We run forecasting...