The confluence of three trends in the U.S. residential housing market - rising home prices, declining interest rates, and near-frictionless refinancing opportunities - led to vastly increased systemic risk in the financial system. Individually, each of these trends is benign, but when they occur...

We provide a critical review of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy at central banks from a finance perspective. We review the history of monetary policy modeling, survey the core monetary models used by major central banks, and construct an illustrative model for those readers who are...

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Merton received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1997 for a new...

Economic shocks can have diverse effects on financial market dynamics at different time horizons, yet traditional portfolio management tools do not distinguish between short- and long-term components in alpha, beta, and covariance estimators. In this paper, we apply spectral analysis techniques...

We propose several econometric measures of connectedness based on principal-components analysis and Granger-causality networks, and apply them to the monthly returns of hedge funds, banks, broker/dealers, and insurance companies. We find that all four sectors have become highly interrelated over...

We introduce a new approach for identifying and monitoring systemic risk that combines network analysis and tail risk contribution (TRC). Network analysis provides great flexibility in representing and exploring linkages between institutions, but can be overly general in describing the risk...

With the rise of social media, investors have a new tool to measure sentiment in real time. However, the nature of these sources of data raises serious questions about its quality. Since anyone on social media can participate in a conversation about markets -- whether they are informed or not --...

We provide a review of macro-finance models featuring nonlinear dynamics. We survey the models developed recently in the literature, including models with amplification effects of financial constraints, models with households' leverage constraints, and models with financial networks. We also...

We represent risk factors as sums of orthogonal components capturing fluctuations with cycles of different length. The representation leads to novel spectral factor models in which systematic risk is allowed (without being forced) to vary across frequencies. Frequency-specific systematic risk is...