The existing empirical evidence does not yet provide a clear understanding of how leverage and expected equity returns are related. While some studies show a positive relationship between financial leverage and returns, others conclude that returns are either insensitive or decrease with...

We view economic time series as the result of a cascade of shocks occurring at different times and different frequencies (scales). We suggest that economic relations that are found to be elusive when using raw data may hold true for different layers (details) in the cascade of economic shocks....

This paper proposes a framework to evaluate the impact of longevity-linked securities on the risk-return trade-off for traditional portfolios. Generalized unexpected raise in life expectancy is a source of aggregate risk in the insurance sector balance sheets. Longevity-linked securities are a...

We study a new class of three-factor affine option pricing models with interdependent volatilitydynamics and a stochastic skewness component unrelated to volatility shocks. Theseproperties are useful in order (i) to model a term structure of implied volatility skews moreconsistent with the data...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a dynamic trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is above or below its target leverage. We provide...

The presence of illiquid assets, such as human wealth or a family owned business, complicates the problem of portfolio choice. This paper is concerned with the problem of optimal asset allocation and consumption in a continuous time model when one asset cannot be traded. This illiquid asset,...

In a tractable stochastic volatility model, we identify the price of the smile as the price of the unspanned risks traded in SPX option markets. The price of the smile reflects two persistent volatility and skewness risks, which imply a downward sloping term structure of low-frequency variance...