I study the history and performance of commercial real estate (CRE) in the pension fund portfolio, showing how many plan sponsors fundamentally changed their approach to CRE investment once underfunding gaps began to emerge in the early and middle 2000s. Several new empirical facts are...

Frequent, yet uninformed, fund flows in Chilean pension plans generate substantial trading in currency markets due to the high allocation to international securities. These non-fundamental flows have a significant impact on the Chilean peso, which is estimated to have a relatively low price...

Economic assets can be classified into two broad categories: those earning an inherent return and those earning a fiat money return. This article shows that both are valued according to the same general principle based on GDP (a constant equal to expected long term real per capita GDP growth)...

Using novel data on bank applications to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), we study the effect of government assistance on bank risk taking. Bailed-out banks initiate riskier loans and shift assets toward riskier securities after government support. However, this shift in risk occurs...

Do banks change their portfolio allocation when facing fiscal reforms that increase the relative cost of their debt? Studying various fiscal reforms across Europe with bank- and loan-level data, we find that both the introduction of an equity subsidy and of a tax on bank liabilities lead banks...

We use a 2013 Norwegian policy reform to study how banks react to higher capital requirements and how these adjustments transmit to the real economy. Using bank balance sheet data, we document that banks raise capital ratios mainly by reducing risk-weighted assets. The majority of the reduction...

Exploiting a granular dataset of banks' security holdings I assess the impact of unconventional monetary policy on bank lending and security holdings. Using a difference-in-differences regression setup and holding the security composition of each bank constant at its level in January 2014, well...

This paper studies the impact of unconventional monetary policy on bank lending and security holdings. I exploit granular security register data and use a difference - in-differences regression setup to provide evidence for the presence of a yield-induced portfolio rebalancing channel: Banks...

This paper analyses the exposure to climate risk of ABS, an asset class frequently pledged as collateral in the European Central Bank (ECB) refinancing operations. This paper focuses on ABS backed by auto loans or loans granted to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and explores ways to measure...

We explore how a relatively small amount of heterogeneous securities created turmoil in financial markets in much of the world in 2007 and 2008. The drivers of the financial turmoil and the financial crisis of 2008 were heterogeneous securities that were hard to value. These securities created...