This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

We show in a fairly general setting of a buyer and seller with the same preferences trading two related assets so as to share volatility risk that illiquidity and virtually all impediments to trade cannot be priced. This is because the buying and selling counterparties must both be optimizing....

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

I show in a setting of a buyer and seller with the same preferences trading two related assets so as to share volatility risk that illiquidity and virtually all impediments to trade cannot be priced in the absence of excess short-selling costs. This is because the buyer values the asset at the...

This paper studies intertemporal information acquisition by agents that are rational Bayesian learners and that dynamically optimize over consumption, investment in capital, and investment in information. The model predicts that investors acquire more information in times when future capital...

We solve the problem of optimal inventory management for a CARA market-maker who faces proportional transaction costs and marking to market. Our model accommodates inventory shocks following an arbitrary compound Poisson process, and allows us to link the optimal policy to the moment-generating...

We analyze a continuous-time stochastic control problem that arises in the study of several important issues in financial economics. An agent controls the drift and volatility of a diffusion output process by dynamically selecting one of an arbitrary (but finite) number of projects and the...

The paper is about pension fund problems where an agent pays an amount x0 to the fund manager and is repaid, after time T, a lump sum x(T). Such problems admit an analytical solution for specific, rather unrealistic formulations. Several practical pension fund problems are converted in the paper...

This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...