Retirement benefit guarantees can ensure a minimum standard of living in retirement. I propose a framework to discuss the design of such guarantees. The model features a standard life-cycle setting, in which individual agents' choices can have negative external effects on public finances,...

The termination of a representative financial firm due to excessive leverage may lead to substantial bankruptcy costs. A government in the tradition of Ramsey (1927) may be inclined to provide transfers to the firm so as to prevent its liquidation and the associated deadweight costs. It is shown...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

One of the most serious problems that a central bank in an emerging market economy can face is the sudden reversal of capital inflows. Hoarding international reserves can be used to smooth the impact of such reversals, but these reserves are seldom sufficient and always expensive to hold. In...

We propose a tractable model of an informationally inefficient market featuring non-revealing prices, no noise traders, and general assumptions on preferences and payoff distributions. We show the equivalence between our model and a substantially simpler model whereby investors face...

We study the optimal portfolio choice of hedge fund managers who are compensated by high-water mark contracts. Surprisingly, we find that even risk-neutral managers will not place unboundedly large weights on the risky assets, despite the option-type features of the contract. Instead they will...

Even well managed emerging market economies are exposed to significant external risk, the bulk of which is financial. At a moment's notice, these economies may be required to reverse the capital inflows that have supported the preceding boom. While capital flows crises are sudden nonlinear...

We study the optimal portfolio choice of hedge fund managers who are compensated by high-water mark contracts. Surprisingly, we find that even risk-neutral managers will not place unboundedly large weights on the risky assets, despite the option-type features of the contract. Instead they will...

A firm's termination leads to bankruptcy costs. This may create an incentive for outside stakeholders or the firm's debtholders to bail out the firm as bankruptcy looms. Because of this implicit guarantee, firm shareholders have an incentive to increase volatility in order to exploit the...

In this paper I investigate whether firms' physical investments should react to the speculative overpricing of their securities. I introduce investment subject to quadratic adjustment costs (along the lines of Abel and Eberly [1994]) in an infinite horizon continuous time model with short sale...