Studies on the importance of skewness for investors find a negative relation between the risk premium and skewness, implying preference for positive skewness. Hedge funds (or money managers in general), however, acting as agents, may have preference for negative skewness as it would mean...

We modify Adrian and Brunnermeier's (2011) CoVaR, the Value-at-Risk (VaR) of the financial system conditional on an institution being in financial distress. We change the definition of financial distress from an institution being exactly at its VaR to being at most at its VaR. This change allows...