We develop an agent based model of traditional banks and asset managers. Our aim is to investigate the channels of contagion of shocks to asset prices within and between the two financial sectors, including the effects of fire sales and their impact on financial institutions' balance sheets. We...

This report reviews recent as well as planned changes to accounting and solvency regulations affecting insurers and pension funds and how they may impact long-term investing by these institutions. The review of existing evidence focuses mainly on the impact of risk-based solvency requirements,...

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...

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....

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...

We use unique institutional securities holdings data to examine the trading behaviour of delegated institutional capital and its impact on bond risk premia. We show that institutional fund managers trade strongly procyclically: they actively move into higher yielding, longer duration and lower...

Mutual fund risk-taking via active portfolio rebalancing varies both in the crosssection and over time. In this paper, I show that the same is true for funds' off- balance sheet risk-taking, even after controlling for on-balance sheet activities. For this purpose, I propose a novel measure of...