We consider financial contracts that are tradable in any quantities at fixed prices. A bundle of such contracts constitutes an arbitrage if it offers non-negative payoff in any future state, but commands negative present cost. This article brings together fairly recent results on how to find an arbitrage provided some exists. Otherwise, a state-contingent, non-profit price vector will be identi...

Despite the size and importance of separately managed accounts (SMAs) and collective investment trusts, their characteristics and performance have not been studied in detail. We show that separate account performance is similar to that of index funds and superior to that of actively managed mutual funds. Management supplies a benchmark for each separate account. When the management-selected ben...

In this paper, we study the potential of stocks as a hedge against inflation for different investment horizons. We show that stocks can be a hedge against inflation even if stock returns are negatively correlated with unexpected inflation shocks, and only moderately positively related to expected inflation. Depending on the investment horizon, the optimal hedge ratio can be either positive or n...

The most natural way of ordering portfolios is by comparing their payoffs. A portfolio with payoff higher than the payoff of another portfolio is greater in the sense of portfolio dominance than that other portfolio. Portfolio dominance is a lattice order if the supremum and the infimum of any two portfolios are well-defined. We study security markets with infinitely many securities and arbitra...

This paper aims at assessing the optimal behavior of a firm facing stochastic costs of production. In an imperfectly competitive setting, we evaluate to what extent a firm may decide to locate part of its production in other markets different from which it is actually settled. This decision is taken in a stochastic environment. Portfolio theory is used to derive the optimal solution for the int...

The mutual fund industry has experienced huge growth internationally, becoming one of the primary vehicles through which individuals and most institutions invest in capital markets. Thus, the evaluation of the performance of mutual funds has become a very interesting research topic both for academic researchers for managers of financial, banking and investment institutions. This paper proposes ...

We study the portfolio decision of a household with limited information-processing capacity in a setting with recursive utility. We find that rational inattention combined with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty leads to a significant drop in the share of portfolios held in risky assets, even when the departure from standard expected utility with rational expectations is small. In...

We examine the impact of risk-based portfolio constraints on asset prices in an exchange economy. We show that constrained agents scale down their portfolio and behave locally like power utility investors with risk aversion that depends on current market conditions. In contrast to previous results in the literature, we show that the imposition of constraints dampens fundamental shocks, challeng...

Owner-managers of private companies are often highly underdiversified. We investigate the consequences of underdiversification at the company level. Information on US companies and their owner-managers is obtained from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Small Business Finances. Underdiversification, measured as the share of the owner-manager’s net worth invested in the company, h...

This paper develops a framework for the design of optimal structured products (equityor index-linked notes) allowing us to analyze the maximal utility gain for an investor that can be achieved by introducing structured products. We demonstrate with data from three of the largest markets for structured products (USA, Germany and Switzerland) that most of the successful structured products are no...