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Climate finance is first and foremost a risk-management problem, which means three things for investors. First, prudent investors will seek to hedge climate change risk by reducing their exposure to this risk. Second, investors will demand compensation for holding this risk. Third, investors will engage with companies to urge them to reduce this risk if they are not adequately compensated for it. For companies, the main implication of climate-risk management by investors is that the companies with greater carbon emissions will have to pay a higher financial cost of carbon (FCC). In their new study described in this article, the authors undertake a comprehensive analysis of the risk compensation implications of exposing investors to carbon transition risk. They explore how corporate GHG emissions have affected the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios of listed companies in Europe and the U.S. over the period 2016 to 2020. Their main finding is that financial markets are beginning to broadly discount companies whose high carbon emissions are viewed as subjecting them to higher levels of political and regulatory risk, and providing them with what amounts to a higher cost of capital. Although price-earnings ratios are generally lower for companies with higher emissions, the discount varies significantly by sector and across firm size, with larger companies experiencing the larger discounts. Although the carbon discount is similar in the U.S. and in Europe, the authors find significantly higher discounts in industries in Europe that are directly covered by carbon pricing through the EU ETS. They even find a small price discount on corporate debt for smaller issuers. Overall, what emerges is a clear pattern of investors' growing concern over climate risk, which translates into an increasingly material FCC for companies with high GHG emissions. This growing valuation discount for companies with high emissions should encourage them to progress further along their decarbonization path, which our results suggest have large financial as well as other social benefits.

We find dealer-level evidence that recent regulation on the leverage ratio requirement causes deviations from covered interest parity. Our analysis uses a unique data set of currency derivatives with disclosed counterparty identities together with exogenous variation introduced by the U.K. leverage ratio framework. Dealers who are affected by the regulatory shock charge an additional premium of about 20 basis points per annum for synthetic dollar funding relative to unaffected dealers. This finding holds even after controlling for changes in clients' demand. Also, some clients increase their trading activity with unaffected dealers with whom they already had a preexisting relationship.

Do credit ratings help enforce market discipline on banks? Analyzing a uniquely comprehensive data set consisting of 1,081 rating change announcements for 154 international financial institutions between January 2004 and December 2015, we find that rating downgrades for internal reasons, such as adverse changes in the operating performance or capital structure of banks, are associated with a significant credit default swap spread widening. However, this widening only occurs for banks that are not perceived as to be Too-Big-to-Fail (TBTF). Our findings question the reliability of credit ratings as a tool to discipline TBTF banks and suggest that regulatory monitoring should remain the main mechanism for disciplining these banks.

We study the impact ofQuickpay, a federal reform that indefinitely acceleratedpayments to small business contractors of the U.S. government. We find a strong di-rect effect of the reform on employment growth at the firm-level. Importantly, how-ever, we also document substantial crowding out of non-treated firms’ employmentwithin local labor markets. While the overall net employment effect was positive,it was close to zero in tight labor markets – where crowding out was stronger. Ourresults highlight an important channel for alleviating financing constraints in smallfirms, but also emphasize the general-equilibrium effects of large-scale interventions,which can lead to lower aggregate outcomes depending on labor market conditions.

Asset returns incorporate new information via the effects of independent and possibly identically distributed random shocks. They may also incorporate long memory effects related to the concept of self‐similarity. The two approaches are here combined. In addition, methods are proposed for estimating the contribution of each component and evidence supporting the presence of both components in both the physical and risk‐neutral distributions is presented. Furthermore, it is shown that long‐horizon returns may be nonnormal when there is a self‐similar component. The presence of a self‐similar component also questions positive equity biases over the longer term.

Default risk significantly affects the corporate policies of a firm. We develop a model in which a limited liability entity subject to default at an exponential random time jointly sets its dividend policy and capital structure to maximize the expected lifetime utility from consumption of risk‐averse equity investors. We give a complete characterization of the solution to the singular stochastic control problem. The optimal policy involves paying dividends to keep the ratio of firm's equity value to investors' wealth below a critical threshold. Dividend payout acts as a precautionary channel to transfer wealth from the firm to investors for mitigation of losses in the event of default. Higher the default risk, more aggressively the firm leverages and pays dividends.

We provide a unifying treatment of pathwise moderate deviations for models commonly used in financial applications, and for related integrated functionals. Suitable scaling enables us to transfer these results into small‐time, large‐time, and tail asymptotics for diffusions, as well as for option prices and realized variances. In passing, we highlight some intuitive relationships between moderate deviations rate functions and their large deviations counterparts; these turn out to be useful for numerical purposes, as large deviations rate functions are often difficult to compute.

Research question/issue. We explore the following question: How do initial public offering (IPO) investors value the existence of prior shared experience (PSE) between the CEO and the board of threshold ventures?. Research findings/insights. Building on the resource provision role of the board, signaling, and the dynamics of decision making within teams literatures, our results show that extensive PSE between the CEO and the board is detrimental to IPO valuation because it augments the perceived risk of overconfidence and myopic decisions sending negative signals to investors. Yet, the industry diversity of that PSE and the level of industry ambiguity mitigate such negative signaling effects. Theoretical/academic implications. We make three main contributions to the literature. First, we make a specific contribution by advancing that extensive PSE between the CEO and the board is detrimental for IPO value, unless it is mitigated by the diversity of such PSEs across different industries. Our results therefore highlight boundaries within which previously accepted findings about the positive relationship between PSE and new venture performance do not hold. Second, we enrich our understanding of the relationship between board design and industry conditions by showing that investors perceive differently the extensiveness of PSE between the CEO and the board depending on the degree of industry ambiguity. Overall, we move beyond prior research on signaling, which has tended to focus on primary intended and costly signals, exploring signals with potential negative effects at IPO. Practitioner/Policy Implications. Our research has practical implications for ambitious entrepreneurial ventures trying to achieve high growth by going public in their early stages of development. Board compositions may commonly be transformed ahead of IPOs to send a signal to the potential investors about their effectiveness in meeting the strategic challenges of being in the public arena. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs, pre‐IPO investors, and their advisors may need to adopt a fine‐grained approach to constructing effective boards at an early stage.

We establish a rigorous duality theory, under No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk, for an infinite horizon problem of optimal consumption in the presence of an income stream that can terminate randomly at an exponentially distributed time, independent of the asset prices. We thus close a duality gap encountered by Vellekoop and Davis in a version of this problem in a Black-Scholes market. Many of the classical tenets of duality theory hold, with the notable exception that marginal utility at zero initial wealth is finite. We use as dual variables a class of supermartingale deflators such that deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption in excess of income is a supermartingale. We show that the space of discounted local martingale deflators is dense in our dual domain, so that the dual problem can also be expressed as an infimum over the discounted local martingale deflators. We characterise the optimal wealth process, showing that optimal deflated wealth is a potential decaying to zero, while deflated wealth plus cumulative deflated consumption over income is a uniformly integrable martingale at the optimum. We apply the analysis to the Vellekoop and Davis example and give a numerical solution., Major revision of earlier paper entitled "Duality and deep learning for optimal consumption with randomly terminating income". arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2006.04687, arXiv:2009.00972

In this paper, I revisit the central trade-off between insurance and incentives in the design of unemployment insurance policies. The generosity of unemployment insurance benefits differs not only across countries, but also across workers within countries. After illustrating some important dimensions of heterogeneity in a cross-country analysis, I extend the standard Baily–Chetty formula to identify the key empirical moments and elasticities required to evaluate the differentiated unemployment policy within a country. I also review some prior work and aim to provide guidance for future work trying to inform the design of unemployment policies.

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Dramatic changes in the 1860–1970 wine trade provide insights on the political economy of regulations and policy instrument choice and trade. An invasion of Phylloxera in the 1870s turned France from the world's leading exporter to a massive importer of wine and grapes. When French production recovered a combination of tariffs, safety regulations and quality standards were introduced to protect its French producers, causing dramatic changes in global wine and grape production and trade, including in Spain, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Changes in wine regulations were caused by relative income and loss aversion factors in political economy. Tariffs were the preferred policy instruments as they directly restrict imports, bring in revenues, have low transaction costs and are preferred political instruments when there are information imperfections. Safety regulations and quality standards, including labelling and input prohibitions, reduce asymmetric information for consumers or undesirable externalities, and simultaneously protected domestic producers. Regulations were often targeted at imported products (wine and raisins) when tariffs were ineffective or constrained by institutions (such as on colonial wine). Hence, tariffs and quality regulations were jointly used in wine policy, both as complements and as substitutes in policy design. ispartof: World Economy vol:41 issue:6 pages:1567-1595 status: published

Manuscript type Review Research Question/Issue What can be learnt with regard to methods in corporate governance research from editorial experience in handling corporate governance manuscripts? We draw on our experience as editors and guest editors of various journals in highlighting some of the methodological challenges in corporate governance research. We consider methodological issues relating to both quantitative and qualitative studies. Within these broad approaches, we discuss implications of theorizing, ownership and types of firms, governance and institutional contexts, omission of governance variables, human and social capital of board members, endogeneity/causality issues, executive remuneration, configurations and interactions of governance constructs, other governance mechanisms, and data sources. Discussion of these issues also highlights the need for more theoretical and empirical consideration of contingent factors influencing governance relationships. We identify possible ways forward and future research avenues. Research Findings/Insights There is a need for corporate governance studies to devote greater recognition to the heterogeneity of various governance factors such as ownership types and director expertise. Studies have generally paid insufficient attention to the configurations of corporate governance. Theoretical/Academic Implications Future research needs to address the connections between the methodological recognition of heterogeneity and configurations and the implications for theorizing. Practitioner/Policy Implications Failure to address these methodological issues implies that conclusions drawn from corporate governance research for practice and policy could well be misleading.

Medical labour markets are important due to their size and the importance of medical labour in the production of healthcare and subsequent patient outcomes. We present a summary of important trends in the UK medical labour market, and review the latest research on factors that determine medical labour supply and the impact of labour on patient outcomes. The topics examined include the responsiveness of labour supply to changes in wages, regulation and other incentives; factors which determine the wide variation in physician practice and style; and the effect of teams and management quality on patient outcomes. This literature reveals that while labour supply is relatively unresponsive to changes in wages, medical personnel do react strongly to other incentives even in the short run. This is likely to have consequences for quality of care provided to patients. We set out a series of unanswered questions in the UK setting, including: the importance of non-financial incentives in recruiting and retaining medical staff; how individuals can be incentivised to work in particular specialties and regions; and how medical teams can be best organised to improve care.

We explore the impact of media content on sovereign credit risk. Our measure of media tone is extracted from the Thomson Reuters News Analytics database. As a proxy for sovereign credit risk we consider credit default swap (CDS) spreads, which are decomposed into their risk premium and default risk components. We find that media tone explains and predicts CDS returns and is a mixture of noise and information. Its effect on risk premium induces a temporary change in investors’ appetite for credit risk exposure, whereas its impact on the default component leads to reassessments of the fundamentals of sovereign economies.

The issues of the forced migration and the integration of refugees in the society and labour markets are high on the policy agenda of the EU. Apart from humanitarian aspects, a sustainable integration of refugees is important also for social, economic, budgetary and others reasons. Indeed, the potential consequences of the asylum seeker acceptance are being often discussed, though little scientific evidence has been provided for the policy debate so far. The present study attempts to shed light on the long-run social, economic and budgetary effects of forced immigration into the EU by applying a macroeconomic model of the European Commission and performing scenario analysis of alternative refugee integration scenarios. Our simulation results suggest that, although, refugee integration (e.g. by providing language and professional training) is costly for the public budget, in the medium- to long-run, the social, economic and fiscal benefits may significantly outweigh the short-run refugee integration costs. In addition, the integration policy has the potential to play an important role in improving the social inclusion, filling vacancies, improving the ratio of workers to economically inactive, addressing Europe’s alarming demographic challenges, and boosting jobs and growth in the EU.

This paper explores ways in which volatility in the housing market that has damaging impacts on the financial system and the wider economy can be reduced. Alternatives to standard debt contracts to finance house purchase are considered. A form of equity loan, where repayments are linked to the value of the house, have major advantages in terms of risk reduction. The way in which such loans can be structured is analyzed.

We develop robust pricing and hedging of a weighted variance swap when market prices for a finite number of co--maturing put options are given. We assume the given prices do not admit arbitrage and deduce no-arbitrage bounds on the weighted variance swap along with super- and sub- replicating strategies which enforce them. We find that market quotes for variance swaps are surprisingly close to the model-free lower bounds we determine. We solve the problem by transforming it into an analogous question for a European option with a convex payoff. The lower bound becomes a problem in semi-infinite linear programming which we solve in detail. The upper bound is explicit. We work in a model-independent and probability-free setup. In particular we use and extend F\"ollmer's pathwise stochastic calculus. Appropriate notions of arbitrage and admissibility are introduced. This allows us to establish the usual hedging relation between the variance swap and the 'log contract' and similar connections for weighted variance swaps. Our results take form of a FTAP: we show that the absence of (weak) arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of a classical model which reproduces the observed prices via risk-neutral expectations of discounted payoffs., Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures