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 ...

This paper proposes differentiability properties for positively homogeneous risk measures which ensure that the gradient can be applied for reasonable risk capital allocation on non-trivial portfolios. It is shown that these properties are fulfilled for a wide class of coherent risk measures based on the mean and the one-sided moments of a risky payoff. In contrast to quantile-based risk measur...

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 ...

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 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. ...

Standard economic theory assumes individuals make decisions over a set of risky domains according to their own risk preferences which are stable across these decision contexts. The validity of this assumption of context-invariant risk preference has led to debate in the literature. We exploit latent class analysis to identify conditional on predicted and realized risk how heterogeneity in risk ...

In this paper, we use stochastic dynamic programming to study the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice of an infinitely lived agent who faces a constant opportunity set and a borrowing constraint. We show that, under general assumptions on the agent's utility function, optimal policies exist and can be expressed as feedback functions of current wealth. We describe these policies in de...

Stochastic optimization identifies the asset allocation that minimizes the probability of exhausting the retirement portfolio, thereby minimizing risk, from unmanaged (constant) and optimally managed withdrawals over the retirement life span. Optimal equity compositions and minimized probabilities of prematurely exhausting the portfolio increase with higher withdrawal rates and earlier retireme...

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...