This paper argues that the Eurozone crisis stems from a risk management failure in the Eurosystem’s design, and that applying insurance theory is useful. We model risk neutral agents choosing portfolios of government bonds of n countries in a monetary union and other assets. We firstly analyse...

The optimal investment to mitigate climate change crucially depends on the discount rate used to evaluate the investment’s uncertain future benefits. The appropriate discount rate is a function of the horizon over which these benefits accrue and the riskiness of the investment. In this paper,...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

One possible determinant of overpricing on asset markets is a lack of self-control abilities of traders. Self-control is the individual capacity to override or inhibit undesired behavioral tendencies such as impulses and to refrain from acting on them. We implement the first experiment that is...

How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

This paper proposes a novel test of zero pricing errors for the linear factor pricing model when the number of securities, N, can be large relative to the time dimension, T, of the return series. The test is based on Student t tests of individual securities and has a number of advantages over...

From 1963 through 2015, idiosyncratic risk (IR) is high when market risk (MR) is high. We show that the positive relation between IR and MR is highly stable through time and is robust across exchanges, firm size, liquidity, and market-to-book groupings. Though stock liquidity affects the...