This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

The paper shows that monetary policy shocks exert a substantial effect on the size and composition of capital flows and the trade balance for the United States, with a 100 basis point easing raising net capital inflows and lowering the trade balance by 1% of GDP, and explaining about 20-25% of...

Our objective is to understand the trading strategy that would allow an investor to take advantage of quot;excessivequot; stock price volatility and quot;sentimentquot; fluctuations. We construct a general equilibrium model of sentiment. In it, there are two classes of agents and stock prices...

We derive equilibrium pricing implications from an intertemporal capital asset pricing model where the tightness of financial intermediaries’ funding constraints enters the pricing kernel. We test the resulting factor model in the cross-section of stock returns. Our empirical results show that...

We use a parametric portfolio approach to estimate optimal commercial real estate portfolio policies. We do so using the NCREIF data set of commercial properties over the sample period 1984:Q2 to 2009:Q1. The richness of this extensive data set and the flexibility of the parametric portfolio...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavytail feature...

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...