The publication of the Black-Scholes formula in 1973 appeared for the first time to put the pricing of financial options onto a rational and objective basis. While earlier option-pricing models relied on a subjective estimate of the stock’s uncertain future growth rate, the Black-Scholes model...

We comprehensively investigate the usefulness of tail risk measures proposed in the literature. We evaluate both the statistical and the economic validity of the measures. The option-implied measure of Bollerslev and Todorov (2011b) (BT11Q) performs the best overall. While some other tail risk...

We formalize the idea that the financial sector can be a source of non-fundamental risk. Households' desire to hedge against price volatility can generate price volatility in equilibrium, even absent fundamental risk. Fearing that asset prices may fall, risk-averse households demand safe assets...

We identify a component of monetary policy news that is extracted from high-frequency changes in risky asset prices. These surprises, which we call "risk shifts", are uncorrelated, and therefore complementary, to risk-free rate surprises. We show that (i) risk shifts capture the lion's share of...

Using a news-based index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU), we find that EPU is positively associated with credit default swap (CDS) spreads and negatively associated with the number of liquidity providers in the CDS market. A 10% increase in EPU leads to an 8.4% increase in CDS spreads and a...

Investor aversion to extreme losses may motivate them to seek out investments perceived to function as a safe haven during times of crisis. In this study, we consider the potential for precious metals to mitigate downside risk when combined with equities, and evaluate the impact on portfolio...

We estimate a discrete approximation of the risk-return trade-off for the US market by using the whole universe of stocks from July 1963 to September 2017. We find the relationship between return and risk to be time-varying and also dependent on the level of risk considered. The proposed...

Stock markets have seen severe price drops over the last 20 years such as the burst of the technology bubble. The mainstream view is that exuberance inflated prices before the burst. This study applies the Schwartz-Moon fundamental valuation model to find no conclusive evidence for overvaluation...

This work studies a stochastic optimal control problem for a pension scheme which provides an income-drawdown policy to its members after their retirement. To manage the scheme efficiently, the manager and members agree to share the investment risk based on a pre-decided risk-sharing rule. The...

In this paper I investigate the relation between macroeconomic risk and higher-moment risk premia. I use existing methodology on higher-moment swaps and estimate the excess returns for variance and skewness swaps. I also introduce new methodology for kurtosis swaps. The expected excess returns...