This paper is no longer available on-line from the NBER. A revised version of the paper has been published as "Liability-Driven Investment with Downside Risk" in the Journal of Portfolio Management Fall 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1: pp. 71-87

We study the nature of systemic sovereign credit risk using CDS spreads for the U.S. Treasury, individual U.S. states, and major European countries. Using a multifactor affine framework that allows for both systemic and sovereign-specific credit shocks, we find that there is considerable...

Hedge funds often impose lockups and notice periods to limit the ability of investors to withdraw capital. We model the investor's decision to withdraw capital as a real option and treat lockups and notice periods as exercise restrictions. Our methodology incorporates time-varying probabilities...

The reaction of foreign stocks to cross-listing events has been documented in an extensive literature, finding that the betas of these stocks change over time. In this paper, I use stock return data for foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges to ask whether the betas changed at all and, if...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables...

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1.31% per month, after controlling for world...

International consumption risk sharing studies have largely ignored their models' counterfactual implications for asset returns although these returns incorporate direct market measures of risk. In this paper, we modify a canonical risk-sharing model to generate more plausible asset return...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Over the past two decades international markets have become more open, leading to a common perception that global capital markets have become more integrated. In this paper, I ask what this integration and its resulting higher correlation would imply about the diversification potential across...