In an in‡uential series of contributions, Kraay and Ventura (2000, 2003) o¤er a“new rule” for the current account: in response to a temporary income shock, thechange in the current account is equal to the change in saving times the ratio of netforeign assets to wealth. We analyze the...

The recent real estate bubble was fuelled by non-risk adjusted lending policies, low interest rates and complex finance vehicles. Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) played a crucial role in the crisis. These vehicles were praised as liquid capital market instruments that allowed mortgage lenders...

Market frictions inhibit perfect replication of property derivatives and dene the property spreadas a price measure in the incomplete real estate market. We identify transaction costs, transactiontime and short sale constraints as the main frictions in this market. Based on these frictions,...

Changing noise levels have a severe impact on house prices and through the leveragein nancing on households wealth. This risk is essential for houses close to airportswith uncertain aircraft regimes. We design and calibrate real options based on aircraftnoise to hedge against noise risk. The...

A credit risk model for determining aggregated portfolio losses is suggested.Beside the common macrostructural dependencies between assetand recovery value, we incorporate possible inter-rm relations among theobligors of the portfolio. Through this channel we also establish relateddefault...

This paper addresses the issue of intergenerational and internationalsharing of longevity and growth risks. Current research on worldwidedemographic changes highlights the importance of longevity risk on financialmarkets and the need to devise optimal hedging vehicles. We present a...

Let S be an Rd-valued semimartingale and ( n) a sequence of C-valued inte-grands, i.e., predictable, S-integrable processes taking values in some given closedset C(!, t) ⊆ Rd which may depend on the state ! and time t in a predictable way.Suppose that the stochastic integrals ( n · S)...

It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationshipbetween the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. Thiscould be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neitherof which seems plausible. Instead we argue that large...

A random variable dominates another random variable with respectto the covariance order if the covariance of any two monotone increasingfunctions of this variable is smaller. We characterize completely thecovariance order, give strong sufficient conditions for it, present a numberof examples in...

We conducted a survey on risk perception of investment products in the German-speakingarea of Switzerland. Unlike the typical two-factor structure documented in the previousliterature, we found that the knowledge-related scales were highly correlated with the riskrelatedscales, whereas the...