The notable increase in international reserve holdings over the past decade and their use during the global financial crisis of 2008/2009 has sparked renewed interest in the analysis of the optimal level of reserve holdings, in particular in countries which are subject to sudden stops. Less...

Recent policy discussion includes the introduction of diversification requirements for sovereign bond portfolios of European banks. In this paper, we evaluate the possible effects of these constraints on risk and diversification in the sovereign bond portfolios of the major European banks....

We investigate the risk of holding credit default swaps (CDS) in the trading book and compare the Value at Risk (VaR) of a CDS position to the VaR for investing in the respective firm's equity using a sample of CDS stock price pairs for 86 actively traded firms over the period from March 2003 to...

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the demand for safe government debt to currency unhedged and hedged excess returns in a sample of US mutual funds. We find evidence of active rebalancing towards government bonds that offer relatively higher returns on an unhedged basis, in particular...

We investigate the determinants of bilateral international equity and bond portfolio reallocation across a large cross section of countries over the 1997 to 2001 period. We first argue that financial integration is not a global phenomenon, as equity and bond home biases declined significantly...

Global financial integration unlocks a huge potential for international risk sharing. We examine the degree to which international equity holdings act as a risk sharing device in industrial and emerging economies. We split equity returns into investment income (dividend distribution) and capital...

This paper presents a dynamic model of a public pension fund's choice of portfolio risk. Optimal portfolio allocations are derived when pension fund management maximize the utility of wealth of a representative taxpayer or when pension fund management maximize their own utility of compensation....

This paper uses micro-level data on mutual funds from different financial centers investing in equity and bonds to study how investors and managers behave and transmit shocks across countries. The paper finds that the volatility of mutual fund investments is driven quantitatively by both the...

Many financial instruments are designed with embedded leverage such as options and leveraged exchange traded funds (ETFs). Embedded leverage alleviates investors' leverage constraints and, therefore, we hypothesize that embedded leverage lowers required returns. Consistent with this hypothesis,...