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...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with rare disasters along the line of those proposed by Rietz (1988), Barro (2006}, Gabaix (2012), and Gourio (2012). DSGE models with rare disasters require...

Financial safety nets are incomplete social contracts that assign responsibility to various economic sectors for preventing, detecting, and paying for potentially crippling losses at financial institutions. This paper uses the theories of incomplete contracts and sequential bargaining to...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the risk of trading revenues of U.S. commercial banks. We collect quarterly data on trading revenues, broken down by business line, as well as the Value at Risk-based market risk charge. The overall picture from these preliminary results is that there...

This paper examines how governance and risk management affect risk-taking in banks. It distinguishes between good risks, which are risks that have an ex ante private reward for the bank on a stand-alone basis, and bad risks, which do not have such a reward. A well-governed bank takes the amount...

Current practice largely follows restrictive approaches to market risk measurement, such as historical simulation or RiskMetrics. In contrast, we propose flexible methods that exploit recent developments in financial econometrics and are likely to produce more accurate risk assessments, treating...

We investigate whether a model with a time-varying probability of economic disaster can explain the pricing of collateralized debt obligations, both prior to and during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Namely, we examine the pricing of tranches on the CDX, an index of credit default swaps on...

We document that even though the normal distribution provides a good approximation to GDP fluctuations, it severely underpredicts "macroeconomic tail risks," that is, the frequency of large economic downturns. Using a multi-sector general equilibrium model, we show that the interplay of...

Value at Risk has become the standard measure of market risk employed by financial institutions for both internal and regulatory purposes. Despite its conceptual simplicity, its measurement is a very challenging statistical problem and none of the methodologies developed so far give satisfactory...