In the new state-run Health Insurance Exchanges created as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), plans with different benefit coverage of health care costs are provided in order to expand consumer choices and increase consumer welfare. According to the ACA, premiums can differ based on...

In order to analyze the pricing of portfolio credit risk – as revealed by tranche spreadsof a popular credit default swap (CDS) index – we extract risk-neutral probabilities ofdefault (PDs) and physical asset return correlations from single-name CDS spreads. Thetime profile and overall level...

This paper investigates the market pricing of subprime mortgage risk on the basis of data forthe ABX.HE family of indices, which have become a key barometer of mortgage marketconditions during the recent financial crisis. After an introduction into ABX index mechanicsand a discussion of...

We estimate time-varying expected excess returns on the US stock market from 1983to 2008 using a model that jointly captures the arbitrage-free dynamics of stockreturns and nominal bond yields. The model nests the class of affine term structure (ofinterest rates) models. Stock returns and bond...

This paper develops a liquidity measure tailored to the foreign exchange (FX) market, quanties the amount of commonality in liquidity across dierent exchange rates, and determines theextent of liquidity risk premiums embedded in FX returns. The new liquidity measure utilizesultra high frequency...

The objective of this paper is to identify the determinants of office capitalization rates for a panel of 52countries (developed and emerging countries) between 2000 and 2006. Our assumption, based on a CapitalAsset Pricing Model, is that the capitalization rate should be at least proportional...

Stein’s lemma is extended to the case where asset returns have skewed and leptokurticdistributions. The risk premium is still the negative of the covariance of theexcess return with the log SDF.[...] Paul Söderlind]

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selectionapproach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyzethe consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts’ dividend forecasts under the...

Traditional tests of the CAPM following the Fama / MacBeth (1973) procedure are tests of thejoint hypotheses that there is a relationship between beta and realized return and that the marketrisk premium is positive. The conditional test procedure developed by Pettengill / Sundaram/ Mathur (1995)...

We investigate a consumption-based present value relation that is a function of future dividend growth. Using data on aggregate consumption and measures of the dividend payments from aggregate wealth, we show that changing forecasts of dividend growth are an important feature of the post-war...