This paper solves the dynamic investment problem of a risk averse agent compensated with a performance related bonus plus a salary guaranteed up to a certain level of underperformance. The main contribution is to explicitly take into account the financial fragility of the principal [employer],...

Does risk shifting incentives or risk management incentives dominate when firms rollover large amounts of maturing debt? The empirical evidence supports the risk management hypothesis by identifying a hump-shaped relation between long-term debt maturity and firm risk. Using...

The properties of information, including "information uncertainty", can be understood only Bayesianly. Common formulations that define information uncertainty in terms of just statistical "precision" (i.e. sampling variance), or any one estimator characteristic (e.g. bias), are inadequate for...

We study an optimal investment/consumption problem in a model capturing market and credit risk dependencies. Stochastic factors drive both the default intensity and the volatility of the stocks in the portfolio. We use the martingale approach and analyze the recursive system of nonlinear...

This paper examines irreversible investment decisions when the interest rate is stochastic and constrained by a zero lower bound using the shadow-rate model of Black (1995). In contrast to the commonly found negative relationship between investment and uncertainty, it is shown that the presence...

The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) has been the cornerstone of the asset allocation for over 40 years. In the past decade though, it led in a rather systematic way to bad investments decisions. One of MPT's main assumptions, investor risk aversion that translates into volatility aversion, biases...

Investors have to be offered risk premiums to invest in risky assets. These risk premiums take different forms in different asset markets: equity risk premiums (ERP) in stock markets, default spreads in bond markets and real asset premiums in other asset markets. These premiums have their roots...

Defined-benefit (DB) pension funds, which are often underfunded, rely on the legal obligation of their sponsor to secure pension rights. This paper is the first to solve the optimal portfolio choice problem of pension funds taking into account the risk on the sponsor's guarantee, and we show...

We derive the optimal corporate pension portfolio policy in a consolidated setting in the presence of PBGC insurance. The paper's result formalizes the forces of risk shifting and risk management that shape the form of the corporate pension portfolio. As in Rauh (2009), the risk-shifting and...

Preqin and Pitchbook data are classified and analyzed to derive a coherent set of risk-return assumptions to combine with Listed liquid assets in a traditional mean-variance framework. We find expected returns of 11%-12% for PE and 8% for PD, PC detailed per subclass. Risk is decomposed in Class...