How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

We study risk and return properties of capital structure arbitrage strategies aiming to profit from temporal mispricing between equity and credit default swaps (CDSs) of companies. We find that capital structure arbitrage provides an attractive annualized return of 24.35% on invested capital....

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

This paper documents that factors extracted from a large set of macroeconomic variables bear useful information for predicting monthly US excess stock returns and volatility over the period 1980-2005. Factor-augmented predictive regression models improve upon both benchmark models that only...

See the article in <I>The North American Journal of Economics and Finance</I> (2013). Volume 26(C), pages 217-226.<P> Research papers in empirical finance and financial econometrics are among the most widely cited, downloaded and viewed articles in the discipline of Finance. The special issue presents...</p></i>

Speeding up the exchange does not necessarily improve liquidity. The price quotes of high-frequency market makers are more likely to meet speculative high-frequency "bandits", thus less likely to meet liquidity traders. The bid-ask spread is raised in response. The recursive dynamic model...

This paper investigates the international spillovers of government debt and the associated risk of inflation within a monetary union when countries have different pension systems. I use a stochastic two-country two-period overlapping-generations model, where one country has PAYG pensions and the...

Empirical measures of world consumption growth risk have failed to rationalize the cross-section of country equity returns. We propose a new factor, termed “the global consumption factor”, to explain the patterns in risk premiums on international equity markets. We identify this factor as...