We study the effects of low short-term interest rates on the optimal portfolio allocation in Markowitz portfolios and Risk parity portfolios. We propose a measure of Portfolio Instability, gauging the amount of optimal portfolio shifts needed to respond to exogenous shocks to the expected risk...

Climate change is one of the greatest economic challenges of our time. Given the scale of the problem, the question of whether a carbon tax should be introduced is hotly-debated in policy circles. This paper studies the design of a carbon tax when environmental factors, such as air...

We estimate time-varying expected excess returns on the US stock market from 1983 to 2008 using a model that jointly captures the arbitrage-free dynamics of stock returns and nominal bond yields. The model nests the class of affine term structure (of interest rates) models. Stock returns and...

A safe asset is of high credit quality, retains its value in bad times, and is traded in liquid markets. We show that bonds issued by the European Union (EU) are widely considered to be of high credit quality, and that their yield spread over German Bunds remained contained during the 2020...

Introducing bounded rationality into a standard consumption based asset pricing model with a representative agent and time separable preferences strongly improves empirical performance. Learning causes momentum and mean reversion of returns and thereby excess volatility, persistence of...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

We examine the existence of physical and transition climate risk premia in euro area equity markets. To do so, we develop two novel physical and transition risk indicators, based on text analysis, which are then used to gauge the presence of climate risk premia. Results suggest that climate risk...

One important source of systemic risk can arise from asset commonality among financial institutions. This indirect interconnection may occur when financial institutions invest in similar or correlated assets and it is also described as overlapping portfolios. In this paper, we propose a new...

Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the...

One important source of systemic risk can arise from asset commonality among financial institutions. This indirect interconnection may occur when financial institutions invest in similar or correlated assets and is also described as overlapping portfolios. In this work, we propose a...