During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term insurance policies at firesale prices. In January 2009, the average markup, relative to actuarial value, was $-25$ percent for 30-year term annuities as well as life annuities and $-52$ percent for universal life insurance. This...

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as -19 percent for annuities and -57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions,...

We develop a pair of risk measures for the universe of health and longevity products that includes life insurance, annuities, and supplementary health insurance. Health delta measures the differential payoff that a policy delivers in poor health, while mortality delta measures the differential...

Value stocks have higher exposure to innovations in the nominal bond risk premium than growth stocks. Since the nominal bond risk premium measures cyclical variation in the market’s assessment of future output growth, this results in a value risk premium provided that good news about future...

Any security’s expected return can be decomposed into its “carry” and its expected price appreciation, where carry is a model-free characteristic that can be observed in advance. While carry has been studied almost exclusively for currencies, we find that carry predicts returns both in the...

We study a new data set of dividend derivatives with maturities up to 10 years across three world regions: the US, Europe, and Japan. We use these asset prices to construct equity yields, analogous to bond yields. We decompose the equity yields to obtain a term structure of expected dividend...

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the link between financial and real health care markets. We document a "medical innovation premium" of 4-6% annually for equity of medical firms and analyze the implications it has for the growth of the health care sector. We interpret the...

We present evidence on the term structure of the equity premium. We recover prices of dividend strips, which are short-term assets that pay dividends on the stock index every period up to period T and nothing thereafter. It is short-term relative to the index because the index pays dividends in...

We study a new data set of prices of traded dividends with maturities up to 10 years across three world regions: the US, Europe, and Japan. We use these asset prices to construct equity yields, analogous to bond yields. We decompose these yields to obtain a term structure of expected dividend...