This paper examines how different asset allocation strategies over the course of a worker's career affect the distribution of retirement wealth and the expected utility of wealth at retirement. It considers both rules that allocate a constant portfolio fraction to various assets at all ages, as...

Consistent with mental accounting, we document that investors sometimes choose the asset allocation for one account without considering the asset allocation of their other accounts. The setting is a firm that changed its 401(k) matching rules. Initially, 401(k) enrollees chose the allocation of...

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and...

Across numerous asset classes, momentum strategies have historically generated high Sharpe ratios and strong positive alphas relative to standard asset pricing models. However, the returns to momentum strategies are negatively skewed: they experience infrequent but strong and persistent strings...

We review the international finance literature to assess the extent to which international factors affect financial asset demands and prices. International asset-pricing models with mean-variance investors predict that an asset's risk premium depends on its covariance with the world market...

Three concepts: stochastic discount factors, multi-beta pricing and mean-variance efficiency, are at the core of modern empirical asset pricing. This chapter reviews these paradigms and the relations among them, concentrating on conditional asset-pricing models where lagged variables serve as...