This paper shows that credit default swaps (CDS) can affect the type of debt firms issue. Firms face a trade-off between investment scale and the cost of capital measured by the credit spread. Small-scale investment is safe, fully collateralized, but earns modest profits in all states....

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage boom and then to the bust of 2007-2009. We study the effect of leverage, tranching, securitization and CDS on asset prices in a general equilibrium model with collateral. We show why tranching and leverage tend...

Coherent measures of risk defined by the axioms of monotonicity, subadditivity, positive homogeneity, and translation invariance are recent tools in risk management to assess the amount of risk agents are exposed to. If they also satisfy law invariance and comonotonic additivity, then we get a...

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

We show that financial innovations that change the collateral capacity of assets in the economy can affect investment even in the absence of any shift in utilities, productivity, or asset payoffs. First we show that the ability to leverage an asset by selling non-contingent promises can generate...

We derive a set of equations which are a simple model for investor behavior in a theoretical financial market. The model incorporates the emotional aspect of investor sentiment with memory of price history which decays exponentially in time. Within this model, the emotional reaction of the body...

We study a two-agent equilibrium model with two goods where we interpret the agents as countries. We analyze the effect of an endogenous habit specification where each country benchmarks its consumption decision against the decision of the other country. We show that endogenous habits can...

The article presents a historical review of the literature related to the empirical problem of excessive risk premium. The risk premium (the difference between the return on equities and risk-free rate) observed in financial markets cannot be reconciled with theoretical models of financial...

The present paper considers a class of general equilibrium economics when the primitive uncertainty model features uncertainty about continuous-time volatility. This requires a set of mutually singular priors, which do not share the same null sets. For this setting we introduce an appropriate...

In this paper we analyze in what way the demand generated by dynamic hedging strategies affects the equilibrium prices of the underlying asset. We derive an explicit expression for the transformation of market volatility under the impact of hedging. It turns out that market volatility increases...