Inflation depends generically on current and expected monetary and fiscal policies. There are three ways to carry $1 today into the future: money, bonds, and real assets. That dollar’s purchasing power varies inversely with the price level. The real return on money depends on the flow of transactions services it supports and the expected inflation rate; the analogous return on bonds is the nomi...

Here we study the performance of a one-period investment X0 > 0 (dollars) shared among several different assets. Our criterion for measuring performance will be the mean and variance of its rate of return; the variance being viewed as measuring the risk involved. Among other things we will see that the variance of an investment can be reduced simply by diversifying, that is, by sharing the X0 a...

This paper is a survey of recent progress in the theory of ruin for risk processes that earn investment return on invested assets.

We show that a competitive banking system is inconsistent with an optimum quantity of private money. Because bankers cannot commit to their promises and the composition of their assets is not publicly observable, a positive franchise value is required to induce the full convertibility of bank liabilities. Under perfect competition, a positive franchise value can be obtained only if the return o...

The basic model for valuation of firm is the Dividend Discount Model (DDM). When investors buy stocks, they expect to receive two types of cash flow: dividend in the period during which the stock is owned, and the expected sales price at the end of the period. In the extreme example, the investor keeps the stock until the company is liquidated; in such a case, the liquidating dividend becomes t...

We study properties of structured financial products optimizing a utility functional of a customer. The conventional method may have the disadvantage that the a priori restriction to a certain number of assets could make it impossible to find the optimal portfolio. So instead of optimizing the distribution of given assets, we impose only the price constraint as given by the CAPM and optimize th...

Given the objective of maximizing the wealth of existing shareholders, this paper discusses some of the issues that arise in attempting to measure the performance of individual businesses within a bank. The paper describes two return measures – return on assets within a business and the return on the ‘equity’ of an individual business – and discusses the appropriate bench-marks. The paper ends ...

W develop a global equilibrium asset pricing model assuming that investors suffer from foreign aversion, a preference for home assets based on familiarity. Using a utility formulation inspired by regret theory, we derive closed-form solutions. When the degree of foreign aversion is high in a given country, investors place a high valuation on domestic equity, which results in a low expected retu...