Financial Engineering

Most private wealth advisors (including trusts and estates lawyers, accountants and investment advisors) assume that a primary goal of their work is to reduce their clients’ taxes as much as possible, including to the point of elimination. The level of sophistication around tax reduction has grown substantially over the past few decades. This is especially true for family-owned businesses but also for all clients with substantial resources.

The covid-19 crisis has led to a sharp deterioration in firm and bank balance sheets. The government has responded with a massive intervention in corporate credit markets. We study equilibrium dynamics of macroeconomic quantities and prices, and how they are affected by government intervention in the corporate debt markets. We find that the interventions should be highly effective at preventing a much deeper crisis by reducing corporate bankruptcies by about half, and short-circuiting the doom loop between corporate and financial sector fragility.

The composition of natural liquidity has been changing over time. An analysis of intraday volumes for the S&P500 constituent stocks illustrates that (i) volume surprises, i.e., deviations from their respective forecasts, are correlated across stocks, and (ii) this correlation increases during the last few hours of the trading session.

Bitcoin provides its users with transaction-processing services which are similar to those of traditional payment systems. This article models the novel economic structure implied by Bitcoin’s innovative decentralized design, which allows the payment system to be reliably operated by unrelated parties called miners. We find that this decentralized design protects users from monopoly pricing. Competition among service providers within the platform and free entry imply no entity can profitably affect the level of fees paid by users.

We provide an applied introduction to Bayesian estimation methods for empirical accounting research. To showcase the methods, we compare and contrast the estimation of accruals models via a Bayesian approach with the literature’s standard approach. The standard approach takes a given model of normal accruals for granted and neglects any uncertainty about the model and its parameters. By contrast, our Bayesian approach allows incorporating parameter and model uncertainty into the estimation of normal accruals.

We study the performance of many traditional and novel, text-based variables for in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting of oil spot, futures, and energy company stock returns, and changes in oil volatility, production, and inventories. After controlling for small-sample biases, we find evidence of in-sample predictability. Our text measures, derived using energy news articles, hold their own against traditional variables.

This article empirically examines the magnitude of risk premiums for direct real estate investments on a global basis. As this article analyzes ex-ante risk premiums over more than 25 years consistently across the world, it enhances current knowledge about the regional differences between risk premiums and helps long-term investors with their global portfolio allocation over time. On a global level, the authors find a risk premium of 4.1% for Gordon’s growth and 3.7% for two-stage growth model. The periodic growth model shows a slightly lower risk premium of 3.1%.

We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period after Lehman's collapse. Owners of multiple homes accounted for 25% of these foreclosures, while comprising only 13% of the market. Foreclosures displaced homeowners, with most of them moving at least once. Only a quarter of foreclosed households regained homeownership, taking an average four years to do so.

We propose a new valuation method for private equity investments. First, we construct a cash-flow replicating portfolio for the private investment, using cash-flows on various listed equity and fixed income instruments. The second step values the replicating portfolio using a flexible asset pricing model that accurately prices the systematic risk in listed equity and fixed income instruments of different horizons.