Institutional investors, such as pensions and insurers, are typically constrained to hold enough wealth to be able to make their contractually promised payments to fund beneficiaries. This creates an additional risk in the economy, namely the risk of funding shortfall. We seek to explore the...

The last decade's boom and bust in U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) prices was at least as large as that in the housing market and also had a large effect on bank failures. Nevertheless, the role of CRE in the Great Recession has received little attention. This study estimates cohesive models...

This paper studies the restructuring of financial intermediation in the United States since the 2007-09 financial crisis. We show that the largest U.S. life insurers have entered private debt markets as banks refocused on commercial banking, against a backdrop of unconventional monetary policies...

We develop a two-country international asset pricing model in which investors are heterogeneous. Exchange rate dynamics give rise to a currency risk premium, uncovered interest parity is violated. Countries whose output growth is expected to be sufficient to satisfy growth in demand have high...

We develop a two-country asset pricing model to explain countries' heterogeneous exposure to global risks and how these affect currency risk premia. In the model we consider separately the valuation of countries' consumption baskets from their sharing of risk. A currency's risk depends not only...

In finance literature it is known that on a financial market in which short-selling of risky assets is restricted, the market portfolio is typically not efficient (see e.g. Fama and French (2004)). This paper analyses two different kinds of regulatory policies of short-sales on financial markets...

In this paper, we study the determinants of expected returns on the listed penny stocks from two perspectives. Traditionally financial economics literature has been devoted to study the macro and micro determinants of expected returns on stocks (Subrahmanyam, 2010). Very few research has been...

Elementary portfolio theory implies that environmentalists optimally hold more shares of polluting firms than non-environmentalists, and that polluting firms attract more investment capital than otherwise identical non-polluting firms. These results reflect the demand to hedge against high...

Upon the announcement of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect program, connected stocks in the Shanghai Stock Exchange experience significant value appreciation of 1.8% over a seven-day announcement window and significant increases in turnover and volatility compared with unconnected stocks with...

Contingent Convertibles ("CoCos") are contingent capital instruments which convert into shares, or have a principal write down, if a trigger event takes place. CoCos exhibit the undesirable so-called "death-spiral effect": by actively hedging the equity risk, investors can (unintentionally)...