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Tjeerd de Vries

Publications and source records attributed to Tjeerd de Vries.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Robust Asset-Liability Management

Financial institutions often cannot replicate long-dated liabilities with available bonds, especially when leverage and collateral constraints bind. We characterize the feasible portfolio that minimizes, to first order, the worst equity loss over a prespecified set of yield curve changes. The solution accommodates general deterministic liabilities and portfolio constraints and includes duration and convexity matching as special cases. The minimized loss measures the economic capital buffer needed to absorb the specified interest rate stress. Under an $\ell^2$ stress set, the portfolio is a constrained generalized least squares projection. A portfolio representation shows how additional stress directions can reduce reliance on unstable exact hedges. In U.S. Treasury applications, robust immunization delivers the best or nearly best funding performance for most liabilities and constraints. Simulated and historical dynamic exercises also show modest leverage, turnover, and transaction costs.

q-fin.RM↗

A Tale of Two Tails: A Model-free Approach to Estimating Disaster Risk Premia and Testing Asset Pricing Models

I introduce a model-free methodology to assess the impact of disaster risk on the market return. Using S&P500 returns and the risk-neutral quantile function derived from option prices, I employ quantile regression to estimate local differences between the conditional physical and risk-neutral distributions. The results indicate substantial disparities primarily in the left-tail, reflecting the influence of disaster risk on the equity premium. These differences vary over time and persist beyond crisis periods. On average, the bottom 5% of returns contribute to 17% of the equity premium, shedding light on the Peso problem. I also find that disaster risk increases the stochastic discount factor's volatility. Using a lower bound observed from option prices on the left-tail difference between the physical and risk-neutral quantile functions, I obtain similar results, reinforcing the robustness of my findings.

econ.GN↗

Capital and Labor Income Pareto Exponents across Time and Space

We estimate capital and labor income Pareto exponents across 475 country-year observations that span 52 countries over half a century (1967-2018). We document two stylized facts: (i) capital income is more unequally distributed than labor income in the tail; namely, the capital exponent (1-3, median 1.46) is smaller than labor (2-5, median 3.35), and (ii) capital and labor exponents are nearly uncorrelated. To explain these findings, we build an incomplete market model with job ladders and capital income risk that gives rise to a capital income Pareto exponent smaller than but nearly unrelated to the labor exponent. Our results suggest the importance of distinguishing income and wealth inequality.

econ.EM↗