We develop a model to study optimal decision making in the face of uncertainty about the timing and structure of a future event. The model is used to study optimal decision making and welfare when individuals face uncertainty about when and how Social Security will be reformed. When individuals...

In the face of rising climate risk, financial institutions may adapt by transferring such risk to securitizers that have the skill and expertise to build diversified pools, such as Mortgage-Backed Securities. In diversified pools, exposure to climate risk may be a drop in the ocean of cash...

Problems arising in Finance have become a significant source of new developments in Stochastic Analysis. We discuss some recent case studies, in particular some decomposition and representation theorems which are motivated by problems of hedging derivatives and of intertemporal consumption choice.

We introduce the notion of a convex measure of risk, an extension of the concept of a coherent risk measure defined in Artzner et aL (1999), and we prove a corresponding extension of the representation theorem in terms of probability measures on the underlying space of scenarios. As a case...

Typical value-at-risk (VAR) calculations involve the probabilities of extreme dollar losses, based on the statistical distributions of market prices. Such quantities do not account for the fact that the same dollar loss can have two very different economic valuations, depending on business...

This paper examines the economics of investing the central trust fund of Social Security in private securities. We note that switching from a policy of having the trust fund invest solely in special issue Treasury bonds to one where some of the portfolio holds common stocks amounts to an asset...

For many years, stock market analysts have argued that value strategies outperform the market. These value strategies call for buying stocks that have low prices relative to earnings, dividends, book assets, or other measures of fundamental value. While there is some agreement that value...

The effect of uninsured labor income risk on the joint saving/portfolio composition decision is analyzed using new techniques from the theory of multiple risk-bearing. Applying this analysis, the effect of labor income taxes on the demand for risky securities is considered. It is well known that...