We propose a model that delivers endogenous variations in term spreads driven primarily by banks’ portfolio decision and their appetite to bear the risk of maturity transformation. We first show that fluctuations of the future profitability of banks’ portfolios affect their ability to cover...

Overall, 72 subjects invest their endowment in four risky assets. Each com-bination of assets yields the same expected return and variance of returns. Illusion of expertise prevails when one prefers nevertheless the self-selected portfolio. After being randomly assigned to groups of four...

The recent financial crisis and historical record suggest important lessons about the design of national pension systems. First, wide fluctuation in asset returns makes it hard for well-informed savers to select a saving rate or a sensible investment strategy for DC pensions. Workers who follow...

This paper considers the arguments for fundamental pension reform in Germany and the United States. The two countries have recently made or are considering reforms that would reduce the generosity of the traditional, pay-as-you-go pension system. Some or all of the lost benefits would be...

The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans differ in their...

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...

This paper studies the distribution of U.S. household income and wealth over the past seven decades. We introduce a newly compiled household-level dataset based on archival data from historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). Complementing recent work on top income and wealth...

We analyze (frequency) connectedness and portfolio hedging among U.S. energy commodities from 1997 to 2023. We show that the total connectedness increased over time, likely due to the increasing financialization of energy commodities. It fluctuates with respect to (i) different investment...