While a mutual fund’s investment style influences the returns it generates, little is known about how a manager’s execution of the style decision affects portfolio performance. Using both holdingsand returns-based techniques to measure the consistency with which managers approach their investment mandates, we demonstrate that, on average, more style-consistent funds significantly outperform les...

In enhanced annuities, the annuity payment depends on one’s state of health at some contracted date while in ”standard annuities”, it does not. The focus of this paper is on an annuity market where ”standard” and enhanced annuities are offered simultaneously. When all insured know equally well on their future health status either enhanced annuities drive standard annuities out of the market or ...

The idea of representing choice under uncertainty as a trade-off between mean returns and some measure of risk or uncertainty is fundamental to the analysis of investment decisions. In this paper, we show that preferences can be characterized in this way, even in the absence of objective probabilities. We develop a model of uncertainty averse preferences that is based on a mean and a measure of...

We investigate asset-allocation strategies open to members of defined-contribution pension plans with a model that incorporates asset, salary (labour-income) and interest-rate risk. We propose a novel form of terminal utility function, incorporating habit formation, that uses the member’s final salary as a numeraire. The paper discusses various properties and characteristics of the optimal asse...

This paper analyzes the role of nonseparable utility and nontradables in business cycles and portfolio choice using a two-country, two-sector production economy model with a fairly general utility function. I find that nonseparability in utility can change the optimal portfolio choice significantly. Unlike the results of Stockman and Dellas (1989) or Baxter, Jermann and King (1998), the optimal...

I study a theoretical model of life-cycle portfolio choice for an investor who has an option to invest in human capital but is liquidity constrained. I find that, since the young are more likely to exercise the option than the old, they are more concerned about liquidity risk (i.e. the risk that the liquidity constraint binds when it is optimal to invest). This, in turn, implies a hump-shaped p...

We study optimal consumption and portfolio choice in a framework where investors adjust their labor supply through an irreversible choice of their retirement time. We show that investing for early retirement tends to increase savings and reduce an agent’s effective relative risk aversion, thus increasing her stock market exposure. Contrary to common intuition, an investor might find it optimal ...

We present an equilibrium model of a moral-hazard economy with one firm and financial markets, where a stock and bonds are traded. We show that it is optimal for the principal to forbid the agent to trade the stock; that the second-best interest rate is lower than the first-best interest rate; and that the second-best equity premium can be higher or lower than the first best equity premium. We ...

We offer a framework to analyze Value-at-Risk based regulation rules and their possible distortion effects on financial markets. Our model is formulated in a continuous-time economy where investors maximize expected utility subject to some regulatory Value-at-Risk constraint when asset price dynamics are not lognormal and exhibit stochastic volatility. To retain tractability of the optimization...

For portfolio optimisation under proportional transaction costs, we provide a duality theory for general càdlàg price processes. In this setting, we prove the existence of a dual optimiser as well as a shadow price process in a generalised sense. This shadow price is defined via a “sandwiched” process consisting of a predictable and an optional strong supermartingale and pertains to all strateg...