We examine how insiders and firms trade when arbitrage is limited. When arbitrage is costly (proxied by high idiosyncratic risk), insiders and firms earn higher absolute returns on their trades (insider trading, share repurchases, and seasoned equity offerings) in the following year. Furthermore, they initiate their trades following greater past price movements in the preceding year. These resu...

This paper presents a potential solution to the home bias puzzle based on a new open economy macroeconomics model. In response to technology shocks, sticky prices generate a negative correlation between labor income and the profits of domestic firms, leading to home bias in equity holdings. In contrast, under flexible prices, labor income and the profits of the domestic firms are positively cor...

This paper studies a discrete-time financial model with or without transaction costs, in which only partial information can be observed. Partial information model means that the investors in the market can observe no more information except the stock prices. This model has been investigated in Karatzas and Xue (1991), Lakner (1995, 1998), and Cheng (2004), etc. Applying stochastic filtering the...

We analyze the problem of real optimal asset allocation for a pension fund maximising the expected CRRA utility of its real disposable wealth. The financial horizon of the analysis coincides with the random death time of a representative subscriber. We consider a very general setting where there exists a stochastic investment opportunity set together with stochastic contributions and pensions a...

Retirement flexibility and inability to borrow against future labor income can significantly affect optimal consumption and investment. With voluntary retirement, there exists an optimal wealth-to-wage ratio threshold for retirement and human capital correlates negatively with the stock market even when wages have zero or slightly positive market risk exposure. Consequently, investors optimally...

We generalise the Black-Litterman (BL) portfolio management framework to incorporate time-variation in the conditional distribution of returns in the asset allocation process. We evaluate the performance of the dynamic BL model using both standard performance ratios as well as other measures that are designed to capture tail risk in the presence of non-normally distributed asset returns. We fin...

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...

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...

Many firms have stockholders who face severe restrictions on their ability to sell their shares and diversify the risk of their personal wealth. We study the costs of these liquidity restrictions on stockholders using a continuous-time portfolio choice framework. These restrictions have major effects on the optimal investment and consumption strategies because of the need to hedge the illiquid ...

This paper studies the optimal choice of home equity release products. The decision problem of a retiring couple is modeled that holds the major fraction of their wealth as home equity and faces longevity, long-term care, house price, and interest rate risk. The couple can choose to buy annuities, long-term care insurance, and to borrow against the home using different equity release products. ...