If an individual with expected utility and a reasonable level of wealth rejects a small actuarially favorable gamble, it implies a very high degree of risk aversion. It also predicts (counterfactually) the rejection of more sizable and very attractive bets. If additional background uncertainty...

When capital market is imperfect, an entrepreneur has to invest substantial personal funds to start a firm and has to bear large firm-specific risk. Furthermore, if a typical entrepreneur is risk averse, private equity should earn a premium for idiosyncratic risk. In this paper I explore the...

We solve and estimate a life-cycle model with earnings risk and liquidity constraints in the presence of tax-deferred retirement accounts (TDAs). We explicitly consider two very different types of households (with TDAs): direct and indirect stockholders. The latter hold stocks only through TDAs...

We calibrate a life-cycle model with uninsurable labour income risk and borrowing constraints to match wealth accumulation and portfolio allocation profiles of direct and indirect stockholders in both taxable and tax-deferred accounts. Tax-deferred accounts generate an increase in wealth...

We study the simultaneous impact of fiscal policy decisions on macroeconomic activity, wealth distribution, and asset prices. We consider a general equilibrium, overlapping generations model with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents, where government debt and capital are imperfect...

The empirical pricing kernels estimated from index options are non-monotone (Rosenberg and Engle, 2002; Bakshi, Madan, and Panayotov, 2010) and the corresponding risk-aversion functions can be negative (Aït-Sahalia and Lo, 2000; Jackwerth, 2000). We show theoretically that these and several other...