Many key variables in finance, economics and risk management, including financial returns and foreign exchange rates, exhibit nonlinear dependence, heterogeneity and heavy-tailedness of some usually largely unknown type.The presence of non-linear dependence (usually modelled using GARCH-type...

"This paper incorporates a time-varying intensity of disasters in the Rietz-Barro hypothesis that risk premia result from the possibility of rare, large disasters. During a disaster, an asset's fundamental value falls by a time-varying amount. This in turn generates time-varying risk premia and...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks, and show that it has significant explanatory power for the evolution of macroeconomic volatility. We define "fundamental" volatility as the volatility that would arise from an...