This multi-faceted analysis of institutional investment defines fiduciary finance institutions as the third pillar of the financial system, alongside banks and insurers. It documents the role played by investment funds and the money management industry during the recent financial crisis, and...

We measure credit risk premia---prices for bearing corporate default risk in excess of expected default losses---using Markit CDS and Moody's Analytics EDF data. We find dramatic variation over time in credit risk premia, with peaks in 2002, during the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and in...

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...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...

Severe economic downturns like the great depression of the 1930s take place over extended periods of time. I model an economy where rare economic disasters increase the likelihood of subsequent near term disasters. The mechanism generates more clustering of disasters than existing models. Serial...

We review the main changes in the interbank market after the financial crisis started in August 2007. In particular, we focus on the fixed income market and we analyse the most relevant empirical evidences regarding the divergence of the existing basis between interbank rates with different...

We study the returns to a simple trend following strategy in commodity futures markets and their drivers. Returns correlate positively to calendar spread liquidity and constraints on intermediation capital. The strategy delivers low annualized excess returns in the period from 1990 to 2004 of...

Slow-moving capital cannot fully explain the 2005 and 2008 arbitrage crashes in theconvertible bond market. Faced with depressed convertible bond prices implying negative option values, some investors continued to buy strictly dominated straight bonds from the same issuers. This finding suggests...

This paper develops and implements an equilibrium model of systemic risk. The model derives a systemic risk measure, loss beta, in characterizing all too-big-to-fail banks using a capital insurance equilibrium. By constructing each bank's loss portfolio with a recent accounting approach, we...