Current corporate risk management theories predict that young firms should hedge more than the established ones. However, the claim is not supported by empirical observations, which also present mixed evidence on whether hedging creates value. This paper attempts to address this puzzle by...

Many important statistics in macroeconomics and finance — such as cross-sectional dispersions, risk, volatility, or uncertainty — are second moments. In this paper, we explore a mechanism by which second moments naturally and endogenously fluctuate over time as nonlinear transformations of...

This paper investigates modern finance’s epistemological status with a special emphasis on its most quantitative part: Black-Scholes option pricing model and its extensions. It zeroes on the analysis of mathematical methods in financial economics and their connection to risk and uncertainty....

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...

This paper decomposes the risk premia of individual stocks into contributions from systematic and idiosyncratic risks. I introduce an affine jump-diffusion model, which accounts for both the factor structure of asset returns and that of the variance of idiosyncratic returns. The estimation is...

We develop a conditional capital asset pricing model in continuous-time that allows for stochastic beta exposure. When beta co-moves with market variance and the stochastic discount factor (SDF), beta risk is priced, and the expected return on a stock deviates from the security market line. The...

We study the pricing of contracts in fixed income markets in the presence of volatility uncertainty. We consider an arbitrage-free bond market under volatility uncertainty. The uncertainty about the volatility is modeled by a G-Brownian motion, which drives the forward rate dynamics. The absence...

We derive an option-pricing formula from recursive preference and estimate rare disaster probability. The new options-pricing formula applies to far-out-of-the money put options on the stock market when disaster risk dominates, the size distribution of disasters follows a power law, and the...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great...

We propose a method to extract individual firms' risk-neutral return distributions by combining options and credit default swaps (CDS). Options provide information about the central part of the distribution, and CDS anchor the left tail. Jointly, options and CDS span the intermediate part of the...