Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionallyless on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth eects onpreferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform astructural estimation of a dynamic...

We build a general model for pricing defaultable claims. In addition to the usual ab-sence of arbitrage assumption, we assume that one defaultable asset (at least) looses value when thedefault occurs. We prove that under this assumption, in some standard market ltrations, defaulttimes are...

We argue that there is a connection between the interbank market for liquidity and thebroader financial markets, which has its basis in demand for liquidity by banks. Tightnessin the interbank market for liquidity leads banks to engage in what we term “liquiditypull-back,” which involves...

Bailing out banks requires overcoming debt overhang as well as dealing with adverseselection with respect to the quality of banks' balance sheets, in terms of heterogeneity inboth the likelihood and extent of their potential shortfalls, of future asset values vis-a-viscontractual debt...

It is well-known in empirical finance that virtually all asset returns, whether monthly,daily, or intraday, are heavy-tailed and, particularly for stock returns, are mildly but oftensignificantly negatively skewed. However, the tail indices, or maximally existing moments ofthe returns, can...

We solve the problem of optimal securitization for an issuer facing heterogeneous investorswith arbitrary time and risk preferences. We show that the optimal securitizationis characterized by multiple nonlinear tranches, and each investor gets a portfolio of thesetranches. In particular, when...

We study survival, price impact and portfolio impact in heterogeneouseconomies. We show that, under the equilibrium risk-neutral measure,long-run price impact is in fact equivalent to survival, whereas longrunportfolio impact is equivalent to survival under an agent-specic,wealth-forward...

Using an options-based approach, we compute the value of the state guaranteefor the liability side of CS and UBS. The insurance premiums forthese two system-relevant banks are calculated in a dynamic setup from2004 until 2009 in quarterly steps for time horizons of one and five years.The model...

This paper develops a dynamic trade-off model of optimal capital structure that takes intoaccount the fact that most firms have both invested assets and growth opportunities. Thesetwo sources of value react quite differently to business cycle risk. In particular, growth optionsare more sensitive...

This paper studies the extent to which risk-taking incentives of CEOs and other governancefeatures in a range of years prior to the recent financial crisis were related to the write-downsof U.S. financial institutions during the crisis. We document that institutions whose CEOs hadparticularly...