We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage boom and then to the bust of 2007-2009. We study the effect of leverage, tranching, securitization and CDS on asset prices in a general equilibrium model with collateral. We show why tranching and leverage tend...

We question a deep-ingrained doctrine in asset pricing: If an empirical characteristic-return relation is consistent with investor "rationality," the relation must be "explained" by a risk factor model. The investment approach changes the big picture of asset pricing. Factors formed on...

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...

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...

An account is given of the principal concepts and results of general equilibrium with incomplete financial markets over a finite horizon, focusing on the generic existence, suboptimality and determinacy of equilibrium. Many results depend on the nature of the financial securities, whether they...

We consider a single-period financial market model with normally distributed returns and the presence of heterogeneous agents. Specifically, some investors are classical Expected Utility Maximizers whereas some others follow Cumulative Prospect Theory. Using well-known functional forms for the...

The present paper introduces a model of corporate strategies, based on institutional theories of the firm and formalized with the concepts of the theory of games. Corporate strategies are balanced outcomes of four social games: capital market, corporate governance, product market and social...

The literature on the equity premium vigorously debates how to measure the premium, what is its size and what determines its variation. This study provides a quantitative survey of the literature through a meta-analysis. We identify how the size of the equity premium depends on the way it is...

El principal resultado de este artículo consiste en la resolución del problema inverso del modelo de Black-Cox (1976), usando el método propuesto por Sukhomlin (2007). Se parte del enfoque retrógrado (backward) para obtener una expresión exacta de la volatilidad implícita en función de...

We prove that in smooth Markovian continuous-time economies with potentially complete asset markets, Radner equilibria with endogenously complete markets exist.