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...

During the week of August 6, 2007, a number of quantitative long/short equity hedge funds experienced unprecedented losses. It has been hypothesized that a coordinated deleveraging of similarly constructed portfolios caused this temporary dislocation in the market. Using the simulated returns of...

New security designs, improvements in computer telecommunications technology and advances in the theory of finance have led to revolutionary changes in the structure of financial markets and institutions. This paper provides a functional perspective on the dynamics of institutional change and...

A common approach to the management of endowment is to treat it as if it were the only asset of the university. This approach leads to prescriptions for optimal investment and expenditure policies that are essentially the same across universities. Indeed, the resulting optimal portfolio...

Using the known result that life-cycle investors will optimally hold portfolios whose returns are perfectly correlated with aggregate consumption, this paper uses a simple intertemporal general equilibrium model to explore the merits and feasibility of pension plans where both accumulations and...

An intertemporal general equilibrium model of an economy with overlapping generations and two factors of production, labor and capital, is used to analyze the economic inefficiencies caused by the non- tradeability of human capital -and to derive a constrained pareto-optimal sys tern of taxes...

The expected market return is a number frequently required for the solution of many investment and corporate finance problems, but by comparison with other financial variables, there has been little research on estimating this expected return. Current practice for estimating the expected market...

A test for long-run memory that is robust to short-range dependence is developed. It is a simple extension of Mandelbrot's "range over standard deviation" or R/S statistic, for which the relevant asymptotic sampling theory is derived via functional central limit theory. This test is applied to...

In this paper, we consider the parametric estimation problem for continuous time stochastic processes described by general first-order nonlinear stochastic differential equations of the Ito type. We characterize the likelihood function of a discretely-sampled set of observations as the solution...

Culture is a potent force in shaping individual and group behavior, yet it has received scant attention in the context of financial risk management and the recent financial crisis. I present a brief overview of the role of culture according to psychologists, sociologists, and economists, and...