NBER Working Papers by Scott Joslin

Nonlinearity is an important consideration in many problems of finance and economics, such as pricing securities, computing equilibrium, and conducting structural estimations. We extend the transform analysis in Duffie, Pan, and Singleton (2000) by providing analytical treatment of a general class of nonlinear transforms for processes with tractable conditional characteristic functions. We illustrate the applications of the generalized transform method in pricing contingent claims and solving general equilibrium models with preference shocks, heterogeneous agents, or multiple goods. We also apply the method to a model of time-varying labor income risk and study the implications of stochastic covariance between labor income and dividends for the dynamics of the risk premiums on financial we...

Although the threat of rare economic disasters can have large effect on asset prices, difficulty in inference regarding both their likelihood and severity provides the potential for disagreements among investors. Such disagreements lead investors to insure each other against the types of disasters each one fears the most. Due to the highly nonlinear relationship between consumption losses in a disaster and the risk premium, a small amount of risk sharing can significantly attenuate the effect that disaster risk has on the equity premium. We characterize the sensitivity of risk premium to wealth distribution analytically. Our model shows that time variation in the wealth distribution and the amount of disagreement across agents can both lead to significant variation in disaster risk premium...