This paper studies asset pricing in a setting in which idiosyncratic risk in human capital is not fully insurable. Firms use long-term contracts to provide insurance to workers, but neither side can commit to these contracts; furthermore, worker-firm relationships have endogenous durations owing...

We present models of asset management by the elderly. We focus on saving, spend-down of assets, and gift-giving, and the influence of health on these precesses. We also study the evolution of elderly health and the impact of economic variables on health outcomes. We present results from...

We propose a model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its unintended welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are unobservable and they incur private costs in running them. Conditioning managers' compensation on a benchmark portfolio's performance...

We develop a performance evaluation approach in which a fund manager's skill is judged by the extent to which his investment decisions resemble the decisions of managers with distinguished performance records. The proposed performance measures are estimated more precisely than standard measures,...

Using a dataset of $17 trillion of assets under management, we document that actively-managed institutional accounts outperformed strategy benchmarks by 86 (42) basis points gross (net) during 2000-2012. In return, asset managers collected $162 billion in fees per year for managing 29% of...

We analyze the degree to which the growing importance of sovereign wealth funds [SWFs] and the diffusion of inflation targeting and augmented Taylor rules have impacted the post crisis adjustment of Latin American Countries (LATAM) to the challenges associated with terms of trade and financial...

We study a firm that justifies its novel use of equity derivatives as a cash-flow hedging strategy. Our purpose is to understand the challenge of translating risk management theory into managerial action. Cephalon Inc., a biotech firm, bought a large block of call options on its own stock. If...

Typical value-at-risk (VAR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...

This paper discusses the recent changes in the market for catastrophe risk. These risks have traditionally been distributed through the insurance and reinsurance systems. However, because insurance companies tend to share relatively small amounts of their cat exposures and because insurance...