We show that realized volatility, especially the realized volatility of financial sector stock returns, has strong predictive content for the future distribution of market returns. This is a robust feature of the last century of U.S. data and, most importantly, can be exploited in real time....

Risk management is now present in many economic sectors. This paper investigates the role of risk management in creating value for financial institutions by analyzing U.S. property-liability insurers. Property-liability insurers are financial intermediaries whose primary role in the economy is...

This paper analyzes dynamic equilibrium risk sharing contracts between profit-maximizing intermediaries and a large pool of ex-ante identical agents that face idiosyncratic income uncertainty that makes them heterogeneous ex-post. In any given period, after having observed her income, the agent...

Contracts serve an important function: allocation of risks. In achieving this function, contractual parties routinely include a force majeure clause in their contracts to be excused from performance in the face of a supervening event. But what events qualify to excuse performance and how have...

In this paper we study the zero frequency spectral properties of fractionally cointegrated long memory processes and introduce a new frequency domain principal components estimator of the cointegration space and the factor loading matrix for the long memory factors. We find that for fractionally...