This paper explores how affiliation to financial conglomerates affects asset managers' access to capital, trading behavior, and performance. Focusing on a sample of hedge funds, we find that financial-conglomerate-affiliated hedge funds (FCAHFs) have lower flow-performance sensitivity than other...

The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous...

This study investigates how three regulatory reforms undertaken in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have affected returns of real estate companies. The three reforms are aimed at regulating different segments of the market – Basel III targets banks, and could restrict the...

We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 have clear origins, namely in the delusionary belief in the merits of policies based on a “perpetual money machine” type of thinking. Indeed, we document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has...

Galvanized by the claims of Greenwood et al. in Bubbles for Fama that “a sharp price increase of an industry portfolio does not, on average, predict unusually low returns going forward”, and Fama’s quote (June, 2016) that “Statistically, people have not come up with ways of identifying...

Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse'', facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to rejuvenate the nuclear energy industry to overcome the...

A standard repurchase agreement between two counterparties is considered to examine the endogenous choice of collateral, the feasibility of secured lending, and welfare implications of the central bank's collateral framework. As an innovation, we allow for two-sided counterparty risk. In line...