Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...

Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

Corporate bond returns in major developed economies increase with lower ratings and higher residual maturity. The performance of various factor models featuring corporate, sovereign and equity markets as factors suggests that the corporate bond factor plays a dominant role in explaining the...

Corporate bond returns in the major developed economies increase with risk, as measured by maturity and ratings. From a pricing perspective, we find little to no evidence against the World CAPM model, where the market consists out of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. However, from a factor...

Equity market liberalizations, if effective, lead to important changes in both the financial and real sectors as the economy becomes integrated into world capital markets. The study of market integration is complicated because there are many ways one can liberalize and many countries have taken...

Much has been learned about emerging markets finance over the past 20 years. These markets have attracted a unique interdisciplinary interest that bridges both investment and corporate finance with international economics, development economics, law, demographics and political science. Our paper...

Little is known about the location of bank risk, i.e., which investors in which countries hold bank-issued securities like bonds and stocks. In this paper, we analyze the (re-)distribution of bank risk across asset classes (short- and long-term debt, equity), across investor types and across...

We introduce a "bad environment-good environment" technology for consumption growth in a consumption- based asset pricing model. Using the preference structure from Campbell and Cochrane (1999), the model generates realistic time-varying volatility, skewness and kurtosis in fundamentals while...