We use a two factor model of life insurer stock returns to measure interest rate risk at U.S. and U.K. insurers. Our estimates show that interest rate risk among U.S. life insurers increased as interest rates decreased to historically low levels in recent years. For life insurers in the U.K., in...

We show that insurance companies have almost nonupled their investments in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) in the post-crisis period, reaching total holdings of $125 billion in 2019. The growth in CLOs' investments has far outpaced that of loans and corporate bonds, and was characterized...

Monetary policy and fiscal dynamics are inexorably linked. When a government faces the risk of getting caught in a high debt trap, debt monetization may become an appealing option. However, independent central banks may be able to allay debt concerns without compromising price stability. One...

The interaction of worsening fundamentals and strategic complementarities among investors renders identification of self-fulfilling runs challenging. We propose a dynamic model to show how exogenous variation in firms' liability structures can be exploited to obtain variation in the strength of...

This Article examines what lessons may be learned from examining how Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have tried to manage the shift away from defined benefit plans towards defined contribution plans. This shift has fundamentally changed the relationship between workers and...

We test the naive model to forecast ex-ante Value-at-Risk (VaR) using a shrinkage estimator between realized volatility estimated on past return time series, and implied volatility quoted on the market. Implied volatility is often indicated as the operators expectation about future risk, while...

Framing climate change as an economic risk has, in the last several years, galvanized investor and regulatory attention, as well as a small cadre of influential business and financial leaders. Initial, risk mitigating strategies for U.S. companies concerned with the potentially-harsh...

When faced with current and future liquidity needs, investors may behave myopically by liquidating the liquid securities, leaving the remaining portfolio vulnerable to future liquidity shocks; investors may also behave strategically by holding liquidity due to precautionary or speculative...

I examine the effects of contemporaneous credit rating and watchlist announcements on the over-the-counter U.S. corporate bond market. I find significant negative daily abnormal returns (-2.91%) over a ten-day window associated with a downgrade announcement with negative watch. The effect is...

The existing literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that securities lenders primarily respond to demand from borrowers and reinvest their cash collateral through short-term markets. Using a new dataset that matches every U.S. life insurer's bond portfolio, as well as their lending and...