Why do many households remain exposed to large exogenous sources of non-systematic income risk? We use a series of randomized field experiments in rural India to test the importance of price and non-price factors in the adoption of an innovative rainfall insurance product. Demand is...

Although small firms are particularly sensitive to interest rates and other shocks, empirical work on corporate risk management has focused instead on large public companies. This paper studies fixed-rate and adjustable-rate loans to see how small firms manage their exposure to interest rate...

This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to smallholder farmers in rural India and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis risk...

Using 40 years of historical rainfall data, this paper estimates a distribution for payouts on rainfall insurance policies offered to farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh, India, in 2006. The authors find that the contracts primarily protect households against extreme tail events; half the...

This paper describes the contract design and institutional features of an innovative rainfall insurance policy offered to small-holder farmers in rural India, and presents preliminary evidence on the determinants of insurance participation. Insurance take-up is found to be decreasing in basis...

Using prices of both S&P 500 options and recently introduced VIX options, we study asset pricing implications of volatility risk. While pointing out the joint pricing kernel is not identified nonparametrically, we propose model-free estimates of marginal pricing kernels of the market return and...

The Federal Reserve (Fed) uses a unique auction mechanism to purchase U.S. Treasury securities in implementing its quantitative easing (QE) policy. In this paper, we study the outcomes of QE auctions and participating dealers' bidding behaviors from November 2010 to September 2011, during which...

We show that the probability weighting of rare events, accounting for investors' attitudes toward extreme downside losses versus upside gains in non-expected utility models, provides a unified explanation for both time-series and cross-sectional variations of currency portfolio returns. We use a...

We develop a nonparametric test to check whether a process can be represented by a stochastic differential equation driven only by a Brownian motion. Our testing procedure utilizes the infinitesimal operator-based martingale characterization combined with a generalized spectral approach. Such a...

I develop an omnibus specification test for diffusion models based on the infinitesimal operator. The infinitesimal operator based identification of the diffusion process is equivalent to a "martingale hypothesis" for the processes obtained by a transformation of the original diffusion model. My...