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...

Brunnermeier et al. (2017) propose the introduction of sovereign bond-backed securities (SBBS) in the euro area. That and other papers assess how the securitisation would insulate senior bond holders from actual default-related losses. This paper generalises the assessment by using the VAR-based...

This paper studies the evolution of the greenium, i.e. a risk premium linked to firms' greenness and environmental transparency, based on individual stock returns. We estimate an asset pricing model with time-varying risk premia, where the greenium is associated to a priced 'greenness and...

This study provides evidence on the existence of a negative Greenium, i.e. a green risk premium, based on European individual stock returns and portfolios. By defining a green factor which is priced by the market, we offer a tool to assess a portfolio exposure to climate risk and hedge against...

This paper investigates in a non-linear setting the impact on the real economy of frictions stemming from the financial sector. We develop a medium scale DSGE model with a banking sector where an occasionally binding constraint on banks' capital induces a relevant non-linearity. The model -...

Hungarian debt level has steadily increased since 2001, with the debt-to-GDP ratio reaching about 84% at end-2011. This high level combined with significant volatility of macroeconomic variable influencing potential future debt paths – GDP growth, exchange rate and interest spreads – put...

The forecasting uncertainty around point macroeconomic forecasts is usually measured by the historical performance of the forecasting model, using measures such as root mean squared forecasting errors (RMSE). This measure, however, has the major drawback that it is constant over time and hence...

We point out that the simple slice sampler generates chains that are correlation-free when the target distribution is centrally symmetric. This property explains several results in the literature about the relative performance of the simple and product slice samplers. We exploit it to improve...