We study how risk management through hedging impacts firms and competition among firms in the life insurance industry - an industry with over 7 Trillion in assets and over 1,000 private and public firms. We show that firms that are likely to face costly external finance increase hedging after...

Derivatives are financial instruments that are mainly used to protect against and manage risks, very often also serve arbitrage or investment purpose, provides various advantages compared to securities. Derivatives are various types and can differentiated by how they are traded, the underlying...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights for individuals. The sponsor guarantee being risky, its riskiness must be hedged to secure the pension promises. This appendix details the implementation of the extended...

We propose a parsimonious general equilibrium extension of the Black-Scholes economy that helps clarify how options' prices, expected returns, risk exposure, and optimal exercise policies respond to variations in the risk exposure of the underlying asset. The model allows one to separate the...

The main objective of this study is to determine a lease agreement to finance an investment project and a solution for managing credit risk. This study investigates three types of contingent leases to reduce the costs associated with bankruptcy and compensate for the lessor's position. A leasing...

Trillions of dollars are invested through index funds, exchange-traded funds, and other index derivatives. The benefits of index-linked investing are well-known, but the possible broader economic consequences are unstudied. I review research which suggests that index-linked investing is...

Discount factors have a long tradition of being computed using capital market inputs for the estimation of systematic risk. They are of increasing importance in financial accounting, including the valuation of goodwill and other intangibles. In view of the volatility of stock market returns and...

R&D is often a highly uncertain venture where experiments achieve successful outcomes on an extraordinarily rare basis. Just one successful product could change the future of a company; the discovery stage can often be an invaluable or disastrous experience. We develop a real R&D option model...

Areva, the world's market leader in civilian nuclear power, was positioned to take advantage of the resurgence of nuclear power. However, three issues clouded the positive outlook: (1) 1.7 billion euro loss on the construction of the first next generation nuclear reactor in Finland, (2) the...

Using asset prices I estimate the marginal value of capital in a dynamic stochastic economy under general assumptions about technology and preferences. The state-space measure of marginal q relies on the joint measurability of the value function, i.e. firm market value, and its underlying firm...