We study an equilibrium in which agents face surprise liquidity shocks and invest in liquid and illiquid riskless assets. The random holding horizon from liquidity shocks makes the return of the illiquid security risky. The equilibrium premium for such risk depends on the constraint that agents face when borrowing against future income; it is insignificant without borrowing constraint, but can ...

We consider a group of mean-variance investors with mimicking desire such that each investor is willing to penalize deviations of his portfolio composition from compositions of other group members. Penalizing norm constraints are already applied for statistical improvement of Markowitz portfolio procedure in order to cope with estimation risk. We relate these penalties to individuals’ wish of s...

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 ...

Real estate investments are typically characterized by high degrees of leverage and long loan tenures. In perfect capital markets, leverage has no impact on the investment decision apart from tax considerations. However, the mortgage financing market is imperfect in many countries. In the presence of market imperfections, an optimal holding period exists for real property investments. We provid...

Resampling implementation of a stress-scenario approach to estimating portfolio default loss distributions is proposed as the basis for estimates of the appropriate absolute level of economic capital allocations for portfolio credit risk. Estimates are presented for stress scenarios of varying severity and implications of different time horizons are analyzed. Results for a numeraire portfolio a...

Portfolio optimization inputs differ widely from their subsequent out-of-sample (OOS) values. As a result, optimized portfolios have 2 to 28 times more risk OOS than their ex-ante estimates suggest. I propose a simple solution to this problem: let the data speak for itself and pick, in real time, the correction that most reduces past OOS errors. The resulting optimized portfolios consistently o...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the necessity to posit a specific utility function to describe investor's preferences and it does not impo...

We investigate the effectiveness of window-dressing as a potential strategy to be used by mutual fund managers to promote fund flows. Using a rank gap measure as a proxy for the likelihood that window-dressing has occurred, we find that fund investors as whole punish those managers who are suspected to have engaged in window-dressing. That is, we find a negative relation between the window-dres...

economic stabilization is one of the main government objectives in the economy. one of the most destructive and devastating factors that could damage financial markets, are price bubble formations. thus, bubble creation in stock markets can be considered as a result of investor behaviors, because the market prices mainly reflect investor expectations from firm’s future perspectives. the aim of ...