The optimal investment to mitigate climate change crucially depends on the discount rate used to evaluate the investment's uncertain future benefits. The appropriate discount rate is a function of the horizon over which these benefits accrue and the riskiness of the investment. In this paper, we...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

For an investor with constant absolute risk aversion and a long horizon, who trades in a market with constant investment opportunities and small proportional transaction costs, we obtain explicitly the optimal investment policy, its implied welfare, liquidity premium, and trading volume. We...

Explanations of why changes in the relative quantities of safe debt seem to affect asset prices often appeal informally to a portfolio balance mechanism. I show how this type of effect can be incorporated in a general class of structural, arbitrage-free asset-pricing models using a numerical...

In almost every financial market crisis we can observe widening credit spreads, especially in the last years during the subprime and sovereign debt crisis. But what exactly drives the credit spread? This paper will outline static components, i.e. default risk, liquidity, risk and the relative...

We analyze the impact of market frictions on trading volume and liquidity premia for finite maturity assets when investors differ in their investment horizons. In equilibrium, illiquidity spills over from short-term to long-term assets and trading concentrates on assets of intermediate maturity....

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

We analyze the term structure of illiquidity premiums as the difference between the yield curves of two major bond segments that are both government guaranteed but differ in their liquidity. We show that its characteristics strongly depend on the economic situation. In crisis times, illiquidity...

We analyze the impact of market frictions on trading volume and liquidity premia of finite maturity assets when investors differ in their investment horizons. In equilibrium, short-horizon investors only invest in short-term assets and illiquidity spills over from short-term to long-term...