Annual Review of Financial Economics - Volume 1, 2009

This is a terse account of group creation of modern finance theory; and a sampling of my prosaic autobiographical investing and consulting for nonprofit academies. Eschewing 1900 Bachelier and 1905 Einstein white noise randomness, my martingale version of market micro efficiency invoked no violation of economic law. My attempts to establish pricing theory for options fell a bit short of the Black-Scholes-Merton Holy Grail. For life cycle investing, mathematicians’ maximum growth Kelly criterion was debunked, as were vulgar notions that necessarily riskiness is averaged downward for long-term investors. Popular Markowitz-Tobin quadratic programming was shown to hold generically only for smallest price variations or for unrealistic risk-aversion functions. Because economic history at best obeys only quasi-stationary probabilities, no sure-thing formulas will ever be definable. Excess returns—excess “alphas”—can result only from early new “insider” knowledge, however acquired—legally or illegally. Boo hoo.

This paper reviews the literature on credit risk models. Topics included are structural and reduced form models, incomplete information, credit derivatives, and default contagion. It is argued that reduced form models and not structural models are appropriate for the pricing and hedging of credit-risky securities. Directions for future research are discussed.

This paper reviews the term structure of interest rates literature relating to the arbitrage-free pricing and hedging of interest rate derivatives. Term structure theory is emphasized. Topics included are the HJM model, forward and futures contracts, the expectations hypothesis, and the pricing of caps/floors. Directions for future research are discussed.

Financial crises have occurred for many centuries. They are often preceded by a credit boom and a rise in real estate and other asset prices, as in the current crisis. They are also often associated with severe disruption in the real economy. This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on crises. The first explanation of banking crises is that they are a panic. The second is that they are part of the business cycle. Modeling crises as a global game allows the two to be unified. With all the liquidity problems in interbank markets that have occurred during the current crisis, there is a growing literature on this topic. Perhaps the most serious market failure associated with crises is contagion, and there are many papers on this important topic. The relationship between asset price bubbles, particularly in real estate, and crises is discussed at length.

The complex interactions, spillovers, and feedbacks of the global crisis that began in 2007 remind us of how important it is to improve our analysis and modeling of financial crises and sovereign risk. This review provides a broad framework to examine how vulnerabilities can build up and suddenly erupt in a financial crisis, with potentially disastrous feedback effects for sovereign debt and economic growth. Traditional macroeconomic analyses overlook the importance of risk, which makes them ill-suited to examine interconnectedness, risk transmission mechanisms, and contagion. After presenting an overview of the key features of the global 2007-2009 crisis, this review discusses new directions for research on modeling financial crises and sovereign risk, including the need for integrating risk into macroeconomic policy models and enhancing early warning system and financial contagion models through a more comprehensive view of economy-wide risks. Also, new tools to mitigate and control macro risk need to be developed, along with new approaches to regulate financial sector risk-taking and monitor and manage the interactions between private sector and sovereign risk.

Different economies at different times use different institutional arrangements to constrain the people entrusted with allocating capital and other resources. Comparative financial histories show these corporate governance regimes to be largely stable through time, but capable of occasional dramatic change in response to a severe crisis. Legal origin, language, culture, religion, accidents of history (path dependence), and other factors affect these changes because they affect how people and societies solve problems.

Much of empirical corporate finance focuses on sources of the demand for various forms of capital, not the supply. Recently, this has changed. Supply effects of equity and credit markets can arise from a combination of three ingredients: investor tastes, limited intermediation, and corporate opportunism. Investor tastes when combined with imperfectly competitive intermediaries lead prices and interest rates to deviate from fundamental values. Opportunistic firms respond by issuing securities with high prices and investing the proceeds. A link between capital market prices and corporate finance can in principle come from either supply or demand. This framework helps to organize empirical approaches that more precisely identify and quantify supply effects through variation in one of these three ingredients. Taken as a whole, the evidence shows that shifting equity and credit market conditions play an important role in dictating corporate finance and investment.

We review recent evidence and future directions for empirical research on financial contracting in the context of corporate finance. Specifically, we survey evidence pertaining to incentive conflicts, control rights, collateral, renegotiation, and interactions between financial contracts and other governance mechanisms. We also discuss directions for future research, concluding that the financial contracting approach offers a potentially fruitful perspective for empirical researchers seeking to better understand a variety of issues in corporate finance including capital structure, investment policy, payout policy, and corporate governance.

Although consumer finance is a substantial element of the economy, it has had a smaller footprint within financial economics. In this review, I suggest a functional definition of the subfield of consumer finance, focusing on four key functions: payments, risk management, moving funds from today to tomorrow (saving/investing), and from tomorrow to today (borrowing). I provide data showing the economic importance of consumer finance in the American economy. I propose a historical explanation for its relative lack of attention by financial economists and in business school curricula based on historic geographic and gender splits between business and consumer studies. I review the literature in consumer finance, organized by its focus on the consumer, financial institutions, and the government. This work is spread out between economics, marketing, psychology, sociology, technology, and public policy. Finally, I suggest a number of open research questions.

This article reviews recent scientific literature on consumer financial decisions over the life cycle, outlining its implications for the design of pension plans. It begins with a review of advances in the theory of rational financial planning and wealth management. It then summarizes the recent empirical literature on the actual behavior of households regarding saving, investing, and insuring their consumption in old age. Finally, it briefly comments on the practical implications of the theory for the design of pension systems and outlines areas of future research.

In this paper, we critically review the literature on finance and inequality, highlighting substantive gaps in the literature. Finance plays a crucial role in the preponderance of theories of persistent inequality. Unsurprisingly, therefore, economic theory provides a rich set of predictions concerning both the impact of finance on inequality and about the relevant mechanisms. While subject to ample qualifications, the bulk of empirical research suggests that improvements in financial contracts, markets, and intermediaries expand economic opportunities and reduce inequality. Yet, there is a shortage of theoretical and empirical research on the potentially enormous impact of formal financial sector policies, such as bank regulations and securities law, on persistent inequality. Furthermore, we lack a conceptual framework for considering the joint and endogenous evolution of finance, inequality, and economic growth.

Volatility derivatives are a class of derivative securities where the payoff explicitly depends on some measure of the volatility of an underlying asset. Prominent examples of these derivatives include variance swaps and VIX futures and options. We provide an overview of the current market for these derivatives. We also survey the early literature on the subject. Finally, we provide relatively simple proofs of some fundamental results related to variance swaps and volatility swaps.

This article surveys recent developments to estimate and test continuous-time models in finance using discrete observations on the underlying asset price or derivative securities' prices. Both parametric and nonparametric methods are described. All these methods share a common focus on the transition density as the central object for inference and testing of the model.

We survey the recent literature on learning in financial markets. Our main theme is that many financial market phenomena that appear puzzling at first sight are easier to understand once we recognize that parameters in financial models are uncertain and subject to learning. We discuss phenomena related to the volatility and predictability of asset returns, stock price bubbles, portfolio choice, mutual fund flows, trading volume, and firm profitability, among others.

Financial decision making is the outcome of complex neurophysiological processes involving, among others, constant re-evaluation of the statistics of the problem at hand, balancing of the various emotional aspects, and computation of the very value signals that are at the core of modern economic thinking. The evidence suggests that emotions play a crucial supporting role in the mathematical computations needed for reasoned choice, rather than interfering with it, even if emotions (and their mathematical counterparts) may not always be balanced appropriately. Decision neuroscience can be expected in the near future to provide a number of effective tools for improved financial decision making.