Without sacrificing tractability, we analyze the effect of fat-tailed events such as catastrophes on the optimal compensation contract between a principal and an agent. The optimal contract depends on all the moments and not just the variance

Due to tougher lending standards, Rent-to-Own (RTO) contracts are getting popular. In a RTO contract, a tenant signs a lease with the option to buy a house at a predetermined purchase price. That is, the tenant receives a call option. RTO contracts allow potential financially constrained...

Evidence shows that firms market time their debt maturity. Specifically, maturity is found to be inversely proportional to the term spread (the difference between long and short-term Treasury yield). That is, firms issue short-term debt when the term spread is large and they increase maturity as...

We present a durable consumption-based asset pricing model with Epstein-Zin preferences and the pricing kernel accommodating the long-run consumption risk. Consumption growth includes a small predictable component as in Bansal and Yaron (2004). The model is estimated with simple econometric...