Weather risk affects agricultural production. Index insurance has been proposed to hedge against severe weather risk, but large basis risk and low demand accompany current piecewise-linear index insurance contracts. We propose embedding a neural network-based optimization scheme into an expected...

We examine the duration-driven trades of duration-sensitive strategic investors, i.e., pensions and life insurers. We use longevity shocks as an identification strategy. Longevity shocks affect these investors' liability durations and induce them to adjust their asset durations. When the...

Time-preference shocks affect agents' preferences for assets with different durations. We consider longevity risk as a source of time-preference shocks and model it in the recursive preferences setting. This implies a consumption-based three-factor model, including longevity risk, consumption...

Technology choice allows for substitution of production across states of nature and depends on state dependent risk aversion. In equilibrium, endogenous technology choice can counter a persistent negative productivity shock with an increase in investment. An increase in risk aversion intensifies...

Discount rates affect stock prices directly via the discount-rate channel or indirectly via the cash-flow channel because expected future cash-flow growth varies with the discount rates. The traditional Macaulay duration captures the effect from the discount-rate channel. I propose a novel...

We study the impacts of local gender imbalance on corporate risk-taking. We find that firms in areas with higher local male-female ratios have higher stock volatilities and leverage, less corporate hedging, and more capital expenditures. Consequently, such firms face higher loan spreads and more...

Taking account of both asymmetric information and rational learning, we show that heterogeneous belief in a rational expectation model can explain many empirical findings of seemingly emotional behavior in stock market, such as bubbles, momentum, contrarian, and technical trading. We show that...