We model the equilibrium price and quantity of risk transfer between firms and financial intermediaries. Value-maximizing firms have downward sloping demands to cede risk, while intermediaries, who assume risk, provide less-than-fully-elastic supply. We show that equilibrium required returns...

We explore two theories that have been advanced to explain the patterns in U.S. catastrophe reinsurance pricing. The first is that price variation is tied to demand shocks, driven in effect by changes in actuarially expected losses. The second holds that the supply of capital to the reinsurance...

Investor confidence and risk tolerance are important concepts that investors are constantly trying to gauge. Yet these concepts are notoriously hard to measure in practice. Most attempts rely on price or return data, but these run into trouble when trying to disentangle whether an observed price...

Recent empirical work has made headway in exploring the non-linear dynamics of deviations from the law of one price and" purchasing power parity that are apt to arise from transaction costs. However, there are two important facets of this work that need improvement. First, the choice of...

This paper explores institutional investor trades in stocks grouped by style and the relationship of these trades with equity market returns. It aggregates transactions drawn from a large universe of approximately $6 trillion of institutional funds. To analyze style behavior, we assign equities...

Survey data on exchange rate expectations are used to divide the forward discount into expected depreciation and a risk premium. Our starting point is the common test oh whether the forward discount is an unbiased predictor of future changes in the spot rate. We use the surveys to decompose the...

Standard models of informed speculation suggest that traders try to learn information that others do not have. This result implicitly relies on the assumption that speculators have long horizons, i.e, can hold the asset forever. By contrast, we show that if speculators have short horizons, they...

We present evidence that short-term interest rates forecast excess returns on many alternative assets: foreign exchange, stocks, bonds, and commodities. On average, a one percentage-point increase in short rates is associated with three percent lower annualized excess returns. To test whether...

Several puzzling aspects of the behavior of United States stock prices can be explained by the presence of a specific type of rational bubble that depends exclusively on dividends. We call such bubbles "intrinsic" bubbles because they derive all of their variability from exogenous economic...

This paper builds on Froot and Stein (1998) in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market...