Money illusion refers to the tendency to evaluate economic transactions in nominal rather than real terms. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the tendency to neglect future inflation in intertemporal investment decisions. Empirical evidence for this “inflation ignorance” is hard to...

We analyze the optimal insurance demand in a dynamic setup with two periods. In addition to the possibility to insure, the investor is allowed to transfer wealth between the two periods, i.e. she can save. While it is difficult to interpret the optimal saving and insurance decisions without...

Inadequate consideration of inflation when making long-term financial decisions – so-called money illusion – can have severe consequences for future financial wellbeing. Thus, it is essential to understand how different methods of informing private investors about inflation affect their...

We perform a general equilibrium analysis in a complete markets economy whenthe dividend follows a jump-diffusion process with stochastic volatility. Agents haveCRRA utility, but differ with respect to their degree of risk aversion. The keyoutput of our analysis is the structure of the...

We consider an exchange economy with two heterogeneous stocks and twogroups of investors. Dividends follow diusion processes, with a constant expectedgrowth rate for one stock and a stochastic drift for the other. 'Rationalinvestors' can either observe this stochastic drift without error or...

In this paper we perform a general equilibrium analysis when the dividend followsa jump-diffusion process with stochastic volatility, where both the dividend itselfand its volatility can jump. We work in a complete markets economy and assumethat agents have CRRA utility, but can differ with...

In this paper we study the equilibrium in a heterogeneous economy with twogroups of investors. Over-confident experts incorrectly assume that their signalfor the drift of the dividend process is correlated with the true drift, butinterpret the signal otherwise perfectly. Rational laymen avoid...

Variance contracts permit the trading of ’variance risk’, i.e. the risk that the realizedvariance of stock returns changes randomly over time. We discuss why investorsmight want to trade this type of risk, and why they might prefer a variance contractto standard calls and puts for this...

Model mis-specification can cause substantial utility losses in portfolio planning.In this paper, we compare two approaches to cope with this problem,robust control and learning. We derive the optimal portfolio strategies and theutility losses due to model mis-specification. Surprisingly,...

The observed prices of out-of-the money put options seem too high given standardderivative pricing models. One possible explanation is a Peso problem: crashes (forwhich the payoff of a put is high) are taken into account for pricing, but are under-represented in the data sets used for empirical...