The financial variance and standard deviation principles of Schweizer (2001b) are applied for the valuation of insurance contracts. These principles are financial transformations of the classical actuarial variance and standard deviation principles and take into consideration the possibilities...

This paper applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of policy, both the levels and the changes, on wage differentials using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1977-1998. The results indicate that...

We provide empirical evidence that risk sharing enhances specialization in production. To the best of our knowledge, this well-established and important theoretical proposition has not been tested before. Our empirical procedure is summarized as follows. First, we construct a measure of...

This paper proposes a dynamic risk-based model that captures the high expected returns on value stocks relative to growth stocks, and the failure of the capital asset pricing model to explain these expected returns. To model the difference between value and growth stocks, we introduce a...

Among the most important pieces of empirical evidence against the standard representative agent, consumption-based asset pricing paradigm are the formidable unconditional Euler equation errors the model produces for cross-sections of asset returns. Here we ask whether calibrated leading asset...

I study the constrained efficient allocations of a simple model of risk sharing and capital flows across countries assuming that each country cannot commit to fully repay its contract obligations. In the model, the degree of risk sharing and the amount of investment are interdependent. It is...

This paper offers an informational explanation for asset price booms and crashes. If market fundamentals change, but the length of this process of change is unknown, market participants try to learn about it by observing market outcomes. This learning generates a boom and a crash, which we call...

This paper analyses the impact of a minimum price variation (tick) and time priority on the quote dynamics and on trading costs when competition for the order flow is dynamic. It finds that convergence to competitive prices can take time and that the speed of convergence is influenced by the...

Does financial development result in capital being reallocated more rapidly to industries where it is most productive? We argue that if this was the case, financially developed countries should see faster growth in industries with investment opportunities due to global demand and productivity...

We develop a consumption-based present value relation that is a function of future dividend growth. Using data on aggregate consumption and measures of the dividend payments from aggregate wealth, we show that changing forecasts of dividend growth make an important contribution to fluctuations...