This paper studies the imposition of position limits on commodity futures from the perspective of curbing excessive speculation and thus manipulation. We present a simple General Equilibrium model in a static Rational Expectations framework and agent heterogeneity to illustrate that excessive...

In the last decade, the Socially responsible investing funds market registered, at the Italian and European level, a steady growth trend in both the number of existing funds and the entity of assets under management. On this basis, this study, after providing a theoretical framework of the...

The equity premium is a key parameter in asset allocation policies. There is a vigorous debate in the literature regarding the actual measurement of the equity premium, its size and the determinants of its variation. This study aims to take stock of this literature by means of a meta-analysis....

We discuss how leverage can be monitored for institutions, individuals, and assets. While traditionally the interest rate has been regarded as the important feature of a loan, we argue that leverage is sometimes even more important. Monitoring leverage provides information about how risk builds...

This is the graduation speech I gave on receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Athens Economics and Business School. I talk about my Greek family, about how I got interested in economics, and then how in the 1990s I came to think about default, collateral, and leverage as the...

I study the long-run behavior of a two-agent economy where agents differ in their beliefs and are endowed with homothetic recursive preferences of the Duffie-Epstein-Zin type. When preferences are separable, the economy is dominated in the long run by the agent whose beliefs are relatively more...

This paper attempts to establish the existence of equilibrium, in an asset market inhabited by two representative investors with different risk aversions. In order to capture heterogeneity in information and wealth, the paper segments the investor population into two: (i) Individual investors...

This paper attempts to measure the risk and return relationship in Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) of Bangladesh. Applying Single Index Model, the study reports statistically significant positive relationship between risk and return both at the individual security level and at the portfolio level....

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

A recent literature shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility, that is, it assumes an inverse relationship between first and second moments of asset returns. This paper suggests a reason...