Publication

Essays in Monetary Policy and Asset Pricing

Takeover Protections and Asset Prices

We study the effects of takeover feasibility on asset prices and returns in a unified framework. We show theoretically that takeover protections increase equity risk, stock returns, and bond yields by removing a valuable put option to sell the firm, notabl ...

Informs2024

Machine Learning for Modeling Stock Returns

Teng Andrea Xu

Throughout history, the pace of knowledge and information sharing has evolved into an unthinkable speed and media. At the end of the XVII century, in Europe, the ideas that would shape the "Age of Enlightenment" were slowly being developed in coffeehouses, ...

EPFL2024

Tiers of joy? Reserve tiering and bank behavior in a negative-rate environment

Andreas Fuster

Negative interest rate regimes typically involve reserve tiering to exempt a portion of bank reserves from negative rates. We study the effects on bank behavior of a large and unanticipated change in reserve tiering by the Swiss National Bank that generate ...

2024

How Integrated are Credit and Equity Markets? Evidence from Index Options

Pierre Collin Dufresne, Jan Benjamin Junge

We study the extent to which credit index (CDX) options are priced consistent with S&P 500 (SPX) equity index options. We derive analytical expressions for CDX and SPX options within a structural credit-risk model with stochastic volatility and jumps using ...

Wiley2024

Demand-based Asset Pricing: Theory, Estimation and Applications

Philippe van der Beck

This thesis investigates the relationship between investors' demand shocks and asset prices through the use of data on portfolio holdings. In three chapters, I study the theory, estimation, and application of demand-based asset pricing models, which incorp ...

EPFL2023

Mortgage-backed securities

Andreas Fuster

This paper reviews the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market, with a particular emphasis on agency residential MBS in the United States. We discuss the institutional environment, security design, MBS risks and asset pricing, and the economic effects of m ...

Edward Elgar2023

Closed form approximation methods for portfolio valuation and risk management

Lotfi Boudabsa

In this thesis we present three closed form approximation methods for portfolio valuation and risk management. The first chapter is titled ``Kernel methods for portfolio valuation and risk management'', and is a joint work with Damir Filipovi'c (SFI and ...

EPFL2023

Contextual Stochastic Bilevel Optimization

Daniel Kuhn, Yifan Hu, Andreas Krause, Jie Wang

We introduce contextual stochastic bilevel optimization (CSBO) -- a stochastic bilevel optimization framework with the lower-level problem minimizing an expectation conditioned on some contextual information and the upper-level decision variable. This fram ...

2023

Can one hear the shape of a target zone?

Max-Olivier Hongler

We develop an exchange rate target zone model with finite exit time and non-Gaussian tails. We show how the tails are a consequence of time-varying investor risk aversion, which generates mean-preserving spreads in the fundamental distribution. We solve ex ...

2023

Automated Design Appraisal: Estimating Real Estate Price Growth and Value at Risk Due to Local Development

Adam Robert Swietek

Financial criteria in architectural design evaluation are limited to cost performance. Here, I introduce a method – Automated Design Appraisal (ADA) – to predict the market price of a generated building design concept within a local urban context. Integrat ...

2023