The paper considers the evolution of portfolio rules in incomplete markets with stationary returns and endogenous prices. The ultimate success of a portfolio rule is measured by the wealth share the rule is eventually able to conquer in competition with other portfolio rules. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for portfolio rules to be evolutionary stable in an incomplete market. In th...

This paper provides implied measures of higher-order dependencies between assets. The measures exploit only forward-looking information from the options market and can be used to construct an implied estimator of the covariance, co-skewness, and co-kurtosis matrices of asset returns. We implement the estimator using a sample of US stocks. We show that the higher-order dependencies vary heavily ...

The objective of this paper is to situate the MENA area within the emerging markets universe. We first discuss the various components of market emergence and generate four bootstrapped indexes reflecting market size, market activity, market pricing and transparency. We then draw inter-regional and country-level comparisons using a probit model and a hierarchical cluster analysis. Our results su...

Using the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index record breaking days as a proxy for market wide attention, we show that as the aggregate stock market intensifies investor attention, stock market response to individual firms’ earnings announcements significantly increases. We hypothesize that there are many channels for the attention spill-over effect and document strong supportive evidence of one ...

This paper solves a realistically calibrated life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with uninsurable labor income risk and borrowing constraints. Since labor income substitutes for riskless asset holdings the optimal share invested in equities is roughly decreasing over life. We compute a measure of the importance of non-tradable human capital for investment behavior to find that ...

Using a variety of different definitions of “neutrality,” this study presents significant evidence against the neutrality to market risk of hedge funds in a range of style categories. I generalize standard definitions of “market neutrality,” and propose five different neutrality concepts. I suggest statistical tests for each neutrality concept, and apply these tests to a database of monthly ret...

In this paper we propose a subsampling estimator for the distribution of statistics diverging at either known or unknown rates when the underlying time series is strictly stationary and strong mixing. Based on our results we provide a detailed discussion how to estimate extreme order statistics with dependent data and present two applications to assessing nancial market risk. Our method perform...

During financial crises equity portfolios have suffered large losses. Methodologies for portfolio selection taking into account the possibility of large losses have existed for decades but their economic value is not well established. This article investigates the economic value in reducing the probability of large losses in portfolio selection. We combine mean-variance analysis with semi-param...

This paper investigates whether certain individuals are prone to behavioral biases in their 401(k) investments. Using demographic data and allocation information for over 73,000 employees, the biases examined include two “allocation biases” and a “participation bias.” The findings suggest that higher salaried employees tend to make significantly better choices. Participants earning $100,000 hol...

Consider any investor who fears ruin facing any set of investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing, he can purchase information about the state of nature in the form of an information structure. Given his prior, information structure α is more informative than information structure β if whenever he rejects α at some price, he also rejects β at that price. We show that this complete ...