This paper studies the welfare economics of informed trading in a stock market. We provide a model in which all agents are rational and trade either to exploit information or to hedge risk. We analyze the effect of more informative prices on investment, given that this dependence will itself be...

Contrary to the classic framework of passive strategies, if investors exploit return predictability through active strategies then there is a tension between the mean-variance frontiers that drive empirical work and the mean-variance preferences that are used in finance theory. We show that...

Motivated by the credit crisis 2007-08, this paper presents a theory of ¶capital market banks¶; banks that use derivative programs to exploit ine¢ ciencies in the capital markets. I model banks. use of asset backed commercial paper (ABCP) programs as a local game, and analyse how these...

We analyse the Generalised Hyperbolic distribution as a model for fat tails and asymmetries in multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models. We provide a standardised version of this distribution, obtain analytical expressions for the log-likelihood score, and explain how...

This essay describes the current debate on reforming Social Security in the US, along with a brief description of how the program works. Along the way it comments on the quality of some reform proposals as well as their political standing. Where issues are similar, some inferences are drawn for...

This paper investigates the issues involved in cross-ownership between banks and firms. The idea is that congruity among the parties in control of the bank and the firm allows to save on monitoring costs, but it gives rise to a conflict of interest between on one hand the parties in control of...

This paper develops a new estimation procedure for characteristic-based factor models of stock returns. It describes a factor model in which the factor betas are smooth nonlinear functions of observed security characteristics. It develops an estimation procedure that combines nonparametric...

The conventional response given to explain the difference between an auction and dealer markets is that auction markets are order driven and dealer markets are quote driven. However this paper argues that same set of equilibrium prices will obtain in each market. In dealer markets liquidity is...

In this paper we assess the performance of the New Keynesian IS Curve for the G7 countries. We find that there is an IS puzzle for both the purely backwardlooking as well as for the forward-looking IS curve. The real interest rate does not have a significantly negative effect on the output gap....

This paper is a copy of the author’s Per Jacobsson Lecture given at the University of Zurich on an occasion hosted by the Bank for International Settlements on Sunday June 27th, 2004. It is reproduced with the kind permission of the Per Jacobsson Foundation.