The Investment Advisors Act of 1940 (as amended in 1970) prohibits mutual funds in the US from offering their advisers asymmetric incentive fee' contracts in which the advisers are rewarded for superior performance via-a-vis a chosen index but are not correspondingly penalized for...

We offer an alternative framework for the analysis of mutual funds and use it to examine the rationale behind existing regulations that require mutual fund advisor fees to be of the fulcrum' variety. We find little justification for the regulations. Indeed, we find that asymmetric incentive...

This paper develops a model for the pricing of credit derivatives using observables. The model (i) is arbitrage-free, (ii) accommodates path-dependence, and (iii) handles a range of securities, even with American features. The computer implementation uses a recursive scheme that is convenient...

It is widely acknowledged that many financial markets exhibit a considerably greater degree of kurtosis (and sometimes also skewness) than is consistent with the Geometric Brownian Motion model of Black and Scholes (1973). Among the many alternative models that have been proposed in this...

Derivatives exposures across large financial institutions often contribute to - if not necessarily create - systemic risk. Current reporting standards for derivatives exposures are nevertheless inadequate for assessing these systemic risk contributions. In this paper, I explain how a...

We document that the convenience yield of U.S. Treasuries exhibits properties that are consistent with a hedging perspective of safe assets. The convenience yield tends to be low when the covariance of Treasury returns with the aggregate stock market returns is high. A decomposition of the...

Over the past two decades, banks have increasingly focused on offering contingent credit in the form of credit lines as a primary means of corporate borrowing. We review the existing body of research regarding the rationales for banks' provision of liquidity insurance in the form of credit...

We study how government policies and corporate commitments to decarbonize interact under two externalities: environmental damages and green innovation spillovers. Unconstrained carbon taxes and innovation subsidies could achieve first-best outcomes, but when government policies face constraints,...

We investigate how firms manage financial default risk (on debt) and operational default risk (on delivery obligations). Financially constrained firms reduce operational hedging through inventory and supply chain in favor of cash holdings. Our model predicts that firms' markup increases with...