Christian Julliard

Consumption Risk and the Cross Section of Expected Returns

This paper evaluates the central insight of the consumption capital asset pricing model that an asset’s expected return is determined by its equilibrium risk to consumption. Rather than measure risk by the contemporaneous covariance of an asset’s return and consumption growth, we measure risk by the covariance of an asset’s return and consumption growth cumulated over many quarters following the return. While contemporaneous consumption risk explains little of the variation in average returns across the 25 Fama‐French portfolios, our measure of ultimate consumption risk at a horizon of three years explains a large fraction of this variation.

Network Risk and Key Players: A Structural Analysis of Interbank Liquidity

We model banks’ liquidity holding decision as a simultaneous game on an interbank borrowing network. We show that at the Nash equilibrium, the contributions of each bank to the network liquidity level and liquidity risk are distinct functions of its indegree and outdegree Katz-Bonacich centrality measures. A wedge between the planner and the market equilibria arises because individual banks do not internalize the effect of their liquidity choice on other banks’ liquidity benefit and risk exposure. The network can act as an absorbent or a multiplier of individual banks’ shocks. Using a sterling interbank network database from January 2006 to September 2010, we estimate the model in a spatial error framework, and find evidence for a substantial, and time varying, network risk: in the period before the Lehman crisis, the network is cohesive and liquidity holding decisions are complementary and there is a large network liquidity multiplier; during the 2007-08 crisis, the network becomes less clustered and liquidity holding less dependent on the network; after the crisis, during Quantitative Easing, the network liquidity multiplier becomes negative, implying a lower network potential for generating liquidity. The network impulse-response functions indicate that the risk key players during these periods vary, and are not necessarily the largest borrowers.

Households' Portfolio Diversification

This paper performs an efficiency analysis of households portfolios based on the comparison of observed portfolios with the mean-variance frontier of assets returns. Data on household portfolios are drawn from a representative sample of the Italian population with at least a bank account. We find that most households’ portfolios are extremely close to the efficient frontier once we explicitly take into account no short-selling constraints, while the null hypothesis of efficiency is rejected for all portfolios if we don’t consider these constraints.

A Comparison of International Residential Housing Risk Premia

This paper contributes to this debate on the substantial risk-adjusted returns to real estate by first constructing a panel of housing risk premia for 13 OECD countries over a long sample period (1966: Q3 to 2004:Q4), and then exploring the relationship of these risk premia to changes in the financial market depth, equity market activities, property tax system, urbanization, zoning regulations and political orientation of the government. By comparing the experiences of housing markets in various developed countries, this paper adds to our understanding of what constitutes the real estate risk premium.