The persistence of financial instability calls into question the adequacy of the current regulatory regime. Acritical review of the three pillars at the core of current financial regulation exposes some structural flaws.[...]

Stein’s lemma is extended to the case where asset returns have skewed and leptokurticdistributions. The risk premium is still the negative of the covariance of theexcess return with the log SDF.[...] Paul Söderlind]

We build a general model for pricing defaultable claims. In addition to the usual ab-sence of arbitrage assumption, we assume that one defaultable asset (at least) looses value when thedefault occurs. We prove that under this assumption, in some standard market ltrations, defaulttimes are...

Using an options-based approach, we compute the value of the state guaranteefor the liability side of CS and UBS. The insurance premiums forthese two system-relevant banks are calculated in a dynamic setup from2004 until 2009 in quarterly steps for time horizons of one and five years.The model...

We propose a simple but effective estimation procedure to extract the level and the volatilitydynamics of a latent macroeconomic factor from a panel of observable indicators. Our approachis based on a multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic exact factor model that cantake into account the...

This paper studies the pricing of financial assets in a complete general equilibrium set-up. We begin with an asset pricing model à la Lucas grafted on a standard Real Business Cycles model. We provide a new decentralized interpretation of such a model in which firms make meaningful investment...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about market expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because the presence of a timevarying risk premium often renders the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of...

Standard representative-agent models have difficulty in accounting for the weak correlation between stock returns and measurable fundamentals, such as consumption and output growth. This failing underlies virtually all modern asset-pricing puzzles. The correlation puzzle arises because these...

This paper analyzes the impact of strained government finances on macroeconomic stability and the transmission of fiscal policy. Using a variant of the model by Curdia and Woodford (2009), we study a 'sovereign risk channel' through which sovereign default risk raises funding costs in the...

We derive new estimates of total wealth, the returns on total wealth, and the wealth effect on consumption. We estimate the prices of aggregate risk from bond yields and stock returns using a no-arbitrage model. Using these risk prices, we compute total wealth as the price of a claim to...