The paper provides novel insights on the effect of a firm’s risk management objective on the optimal design of risk transfer instruments. I analyze the interrelation between the structure of the optimal insurance contract and the firm's objective to minimize the required equity it has to hold...

We provide a novel benefit of Alternative Risk Transfer (ART) products with parametric or index triggers. When a reinsurer has private information about his client's risk, outside reinsurers will price their reinsurance offer less aggressively. Outsiders are subject to adverse selection as only...

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) regularly publishes monthly and quarterly forecasts of the price of crude oil for horizons up to two years, which are widely used by practitioners. Traditionally, such out-of-sample forecasts have been largely judgmental, making them difficult to...

One of the leading methods of estimating the structural parameters of DSGE models is the VAR-based impulse response matching estimator. The existing asympotic theory for this estimator does not cover situations in which the number of impulse response parameters exceeds the number of VAR model...

Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about market expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because the presence of a timevarying risk premium often renders the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of...

Insurance contracts are often complex and difficult to verify outside the insurance relation. We show that standard one-period insurance policies with an upper limit and a deductible are the optimal incentive-compatible contracts in a competitive market with repeated interaction. Optimal group...

Although there is much interest in the future retail price of gasoline among consumers, industry analysts, and policymakers, it is widely believed that changes in the price of gasoline are essentially unforecastable given publicly available information. We explore a range of new forecasting...