Managing retirement wealth is one of the major financial decisions that individuals face. In this setting, I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock...

Using a novel dataset with over 100,000 actual payout decisions, we investigate the nature of the strong negative relationship between recent stock returns and the annuitization of retirement savings. After controlling for several standard explanations (e.g., wealth effects), we present evidence...

This paper investigates the day of the week effect in the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE) General Index over a ten year period divided into two subperiods: 1995-2000 and 2001-2004. Five major indices are also considered: Banking, Insurance, and Miscellaneous for the first subperiod, and FTSE-20 and...

I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock market returns decrease the likelihood of employees choosing an annuity over a lump sum, and vice versa. More...

I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock market returns decrease the likelihood of employees choosing an annuity over a lump sum, and vice versa. More...

This paper investigates the impact of natural catastrophes and the 9-11 attacks on (1) the volatility of insurance stocks and (2) the correlation of insurance stocks with the market. We find that natural catastrophes increase the volatility of insurance stocks. They also have a tendency to...

This paper introduces a no-arbitrage framework to assess how macroeconomic factors help explain the risk-premium agents require to bear the risk of fluctuations in stock market volatility. We develop a model in which return volatility and volatility risk-premia are stochastic and derive...

This paper introduces a no-arbitrage framework to assess how macroeconomic factors help explain the risk-premium agents require to bear the risk of fluctuations in stock market volatility. We develop a model in which stock volatility and volatility risk-premia are stochastic and derive...

Sellers of variance swaps earn time-varying risk premia for their exposure to realized variance, the level of variance swap rates, and the slope of the variance swap curve. To measure risk premia, we estimate a dynamic term structure model that decomposes variance swap rates into expected...

Over the last three decades, the world economy has been facing stock market crashes, currency crisis, the dot-com and real estate bubble burst, credit crunch and banking panics. As a response, extreme value theory (EVT) provides a set of ready-made approaches to risk management analysis....