The importance of investment portfolio allocation has become more apparent since the onset of the late 2000s Great Recession. Individual willingness to take financial risks affects portfolio decisions and investment returns among other factors. Previous research found that people of different...

This paper introduces a model-free decomposition of S&P 500 forward market index returns in terms of realized and implied dispersion, downside, and tail risk using option portfolios. The decomposition lends itself by construction to learn about the different sources of risk in the market return,...

We study optimal execution with "self-exciting" price impact, where persistent trades not only incur price impact but also increase the execution costs for successive orders. This model is motivated by an equilibrium between fundamental sellers, market makers, and end users. For risk-neutral...

We study positional portfolio management strategies in which the manager maximizes an expected utility function written on the cross-sectional rank (position) of the portfolio return. The objective function reflects the manager's goal to be well-ranked among competitors. To implement positional...

We study portfolio allocation and characterize contracts issued by firms in the international financial market when investors exhibit ambiguity aversion and perceive ambiguity in assets issued in foreign locations. Increases in the variance of their risky production process cause firms to issue...

We investigate the gender difference in financial risk aversion using a survey of finance professors from universities across the United States. We compare their actual portfolio allocations to that of respondents in the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We find that among...

We study the role of risk preferences and frictions in portfolio choice using variation in 401(k) default options. Patterns of active choice in response to different default funds imply that, absent participation frictions, 94% of investors prefer holding stocks, with an equity share of...

This note gives the conditions on preferences to guarantee the monotonicity of asset prices when the payoffs of the risky asset change in the sense of the Nth stochastic dominance and with an Nth degree increase in risk. Those conditions are expressed in terms of the sign of the successive...