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...

We investigate the implications of technological innovation and non-diversifiable risk on entrepreneurial entry and optimal portfolio choice. In a real options model where two risk-averse individuals strategically decide on technology adoption, we show that the impact of non-diversifiable risk on the option timing decision is ambiguous and depends on the frequency of technological change. Compa...

SIPP data are used to analyze the relative wealth position of Mexican immigrants in the United States. PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE JEL: J61, G11, J10 ∗Deborah Cobb-Clark, SPEAR Centre, RSSS, Bldg. 9, ANU, Canberra, ACT 0200. Phone: (61)-2-6125-3267. Fax: (61)-2-6125-0182. E-mail: [email protected]. Vincent Hildebrand, Department of Economics, 363 York Hall, Glendon College, York Universi...

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...

We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyeror seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When measured annually, small trade order imbalance forecasts future returns; stocks heavily bought underperform ...

We argue that “narrow framing,” whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, may be a more important feature of decisionmaking than previously realized. Our starting point is the evidence that people are often averse to a small, independent gamble, even when the gamble is actuarially favorable. We find that a surprisingly wide range of utility functions, incl...

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 perform a structural estimation of the preference parameters in a buffer-stock consumption model augmented with temptation disutility. We adopt a two-stage Method of Simulated Moments methodology to match our simulated moments with those observed in the US Survey of Consumer Finances. To identify the parameters we use liquid and quasi-liquid (retirement) wealth holdings at different ages as ...