Recent empirical work suggests a strong connection between the incentives money managers are offered and their risk-taking behavior. We develop a general model of delegated portfolio management, with the feature that the agent can control the riskiness of the portfolio. This represents a...

This study develops a theoretical model that parameterizes cross-sectional differences in opportunity set risk within venture capital markets. The theoretical model shows clusters of venture capital activity can be induced by non-monotonic relations that obtain between search costs for projects...

The condition of Risk Aversion implies that the Utility Function must be concave. Taking into account the dependence of the Utility Function on the wealth that in turn depends on the return, we consider a return with any type of two-parameter distribution. It is possible to define Risk and...

In this paper, I develop a model in which risk-averse investors possess private information regarding both a stock's expected payoff and its risk. These investors trade in the stock and a derivative whose payoff is driven by the stock's risk. In equilibrium, the derivative is used to speculate...

We use an economic experiment to examine the impact of an uncertain level of asymmetric information on the behavior of security dealers. Specifically, we distinguish three types of uncertainty with respect to informed trading - risk, compound risk, and ambiguity - for both a monopoly and a...

Efforts to control bank risk address the wrong problem in the wrong way. They presume that the financial crisis was caused by CEOs who failed to supervise risk-taking employees. The responses focus on executive pay, believing that executives will bring non-executives into line — using...

In merger agreements, the seller makes contractual representations and warranties (“reps”) about the state of the target, e.g., attesting to the accuracy of the target’s financial statements. We obtain a proprietary sample of claims for breaches of the reps in acquisition agreements...

This paper examines how risk in trading activity can affect the volatility of asset prices. We look for this relationship in the behavior of interest rate swap spreads and in the volume and interest rates of repurchase contracts. Specifically, we focus on convergence trading, in which...

We examine how analysts' changing incentives driven by changes in market uncertainty affect analyst output, under a simple utility-maximizing framework. Analysts issue more optimistically biased forecasts and buy recommendations under high market uncertainty (VIX). The lower reputational costs...

Utilizing an influential event, the 2005 Lehman index rule change, we examined the role of multiple bond ratings in corporate hedging. We find that U.S. firms exhibit a sharp increase in their demand for a third Fitch rating after the Lehman event, with the pattern particularly significant for...