This paper examines households' self-insurance in financial markets when a rare personal disaster, such as disability or long-term unemployment, may occur during working years. Personal disaster risk alters lifetime ex-ante investment choices, even if most workers will not experience a disaster....

Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees that resemble out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to tail risk. Using the U.S. life insurance industry as a laboratory, we present a model in which variable annuity (VA) guarantees and associated hedging operate within the regulatory...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

This paper produces new evidence and stylised facts on housing, wealth accumulation and wealth distribution, relying on an in-depth analysis of micro-based data on household wealth across OECD countries. The analysis addresses several questions: i) How is homeownership and housing tenure...

We study optimal capital requirement regulation in a dynamic quantitative model in which nonfinancial firms, as well as households, hold deposits. Firms hold deposits for precautionary reasons and to facilitate the acquisition of production inputs. Our theoretical analysis identifies a novel...

Macro-based asset allocation, i.e., the identification of turning points in macro-financial cycles and the allocation of assets accordingly, has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. This interest was sparked by volatile financial markets, more synchronized returns across asset classes...

The NZ economy has performed well over the past few years, having achieved relatively strong GDP and employment growth. However, some constraints to sustaining this momentum beyond the short term are emerging in the fields of skills, housing and urban infrastructure. Skills shortages have risen...

In the run-up to the financial crisis, indebtedness of households and non-financial businesses rose to historically high levels in many OECD countries; gross debt of financial companies rose dramatically relative to GDP. Much of the debt accumulation appears to have been based on excessive...