Risk Management Tools

Risk Premia in International Equity Markets Revisited
Recent evidence suggests that global equity markets are becoming more risky. We find that much of the apparent increase in international variance and covariance of returns can be attributed to systematic variations in global risk premia correlated across markets, rather than to any fundamental change in the risk attributes of these markets. This result has interest both for practitioners and for those interested in modeling global asset prices. Read the complete paper here.

Papers

ABSTRACT (Click Here To Open)'

Recent evidence suggests that global equity markets are becoming more risky. We find that much of the apparent increase in international variance and covariance of returns can be attributed to systematic variations in global risk premia correlated across markets, rather than to any fundamental change in the risk attributes of these markets. This result has interest both for practitioners and for those interested in modeling global asset prices.
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Modern asset pricing theory is based on the assumption that investors have heterogeneous information. We provide direct evidence of the importance of information asymmetry for asset prices and investor demands using three natural experiments that capture plausibly exogenous variation in information asymmetry on a stock-by-stock basis for a large set of U.S. companies. Consistent with predictions derived from an asymmetric-information rational expectations model with multiple assets and multiple signals, we find that prices and uninformed investors' demands fall as information asymmetry increases. In the cross-section, these falls are larger, the more investors are uninformed, the larger and more variable is stock turnover, the more uncertain is the asset's payoff, and the more precise is the lost signal. We show that at least part of the fall in prices is due to expected returns becoming more sensitive to liquidity risk. Our results confirm that information asymmetry has a substantial effect on asset prices and imply that a primary channel linking asymmetry to prices is liquidity.
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Value-at-risk fail to capture all aspect of market risk,argue Jacob Boudoukh , Mathew Richardson and Robert Whitelaw,who present a complementary risk measure and worst case scenario analysis.
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Three of the most fundamental changes in US corporations since the early 1970s have been (1) the increased importance of organizational capital in production, (2) the increase in managerial income inequality and pay-performance sensitivity, and (3) the secular decrease in labor market reallocation. Our paper develops a simple explanation for these changes: A shift in the composition of productivity growth away from vintage-specific to general growth. This shift has stimulated the accumulation of organizational capital in existing firms and reduced the need for reallocating workers to new firms. We characterize the optimal managerial compensation contract when firms accumulate organizational capital but risk-averse managers cannot commit to staying with the firm. A calibrated version of the model reproduces the increase in managerial compensation inequality and the increased sensitivity of pay to performance in the data over the last three decades.
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A conspicuous amount of aggregate tail risk is missing from the price of financial sector crash insurance during the 2007-2009 crisis. The difference in costs of out-of-the-money put options for individual banks, and puts on the financial sector index, increases fourfold from its pre-crisis level. At the same time, correlations among bank stocks surge, suggesting the high put spread cannot be attributed to a relative increase in idiosyncratic risk. We show that this phenomenon is unique to the financial sector, that it cannot be explained by observed risk dynamics (volatilities and correlations), and that illiquidity and no-arbitrage violations are unlikely culprits. Instead, we provide evidence that a collective government guarantee for the financial sector lowers index put prices far more than those of individual banks, explaining the divergence in the basket-index spread. By embedding a bailout in the standard one-factor option pricing model, we can closely replicate observed put spread dynamics. During the crisis, the spread responds acutely to government intervention announcements.
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