We study the impact of regulations on the investment decisions of a defined benefits pension plan. We assess the influence of ex ante (preventive) and ex post (punitive) risk constraints on the gains to dynamic, as opposed to myopic, decision making. We find that preventive measures, such as...

I study the cross-section of expected stock returns in a general equilibrium framework where agents form habits over individual varieties of goods. Goods are produced by monopolistically competitive firms whose income and price elasticities of demand depend on the habit formation of the...

We estimate firm-specific marginal cost of debt functions for a large panel of companies between 1980 and 2007. The marginal cost curves are identified by exogenous variation in the marginal tax benefits of debt. The location of a given company's cost of debt function varies with characteristics...

We propose a latent-variables approach within a present-value model to estimate the expected returns and expected dividend growth rates of the aggregate stock market. This approach aggregates information contained in the whole history of the price-dividend ratio and dividend growth rates to...

We study an institutional investment problem in which a centralized decision maker, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), for example, employs multiple asset managers to implement and execute investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn,...

This paper illustrates how to perform likelihood-based inference in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with Epstein-Zin preferences. This class of preferences has recently become a popular device to account for asset pricing observations and other phenomena that are challenging...

We use a new data set on dividend futures with maturities up to 10 years to uncover the term structure of risk-adjusted expected dividend growth across three major regions around the world: the US, Europe and Japan. We compare the term structur es of growth before and after the financial crisis...