This paper proposes a new approach for modeling investor fear after rare disasters. The key element is to take into account that investors' information about fundamentals driving rare downward jumps in the dividend process is not perfect. Bayesian learning implies that beliefs about the...

Using a calibrated OLG model with several sources of uncertainty we find that the impact of ageing and of reform of social security upon the demand for housing and the level of owner occupation is substantial. The overall structure of household asset holdings – in particular the split between...

This Paper studies the optimal policies of borrowers (firms or individuals) who may default subject to default costs, and analyses the asset pricing implications. Borrowers defaulting under adverse economic conditions may, despite incurring default costs, emerge as wealthier than non-borrowers...

Money managers behave strategically when competing for fund flows within relatively small groups. We study strategic interaction between two risk-averse managers in continuous time, characterizing analytically their unique equilibrium dynamic investments. Driven by chasing and contrarian...

Despite much work on hedging in incomplete markets, the literature still lacks tractable dynamic hedges in plausible environments. In this article, we provide a simple solution to this problem in a general incomplete-market economy in which a hedger, guided by the traditional minimum-variance...

Mean-variance criteria remain prevalent in multi-period problems, and yet not much is known about their dynamically optimal policies. We provide a fully analytical characterization of the optimal dynamic mean-variance portfolios within a general incomplete-market economy, and recover a simple...

We economically motivate and then test a range of hypotheses regarding performance and risk differences between UCITS-compliant and other hedge funds. The latter exhibit more suspicious return patterns than do absolute return UCITS (ARUs), but ARUs exhibit higher levels of operational risk. We...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

A worker can contribute pre-tax dollars to a private pension plan. Under a progressive tax, this feature reduces income taxes. Ippolito (1986} argues that an individual in 1979 can reduce lifetime taxes by 20%. We re-examine his analysis using the complete time-series of US income tax history...

Employing a new dataset of over 9,000 expressed demands for over 700 hedge funds from a secondary market for hedge funds, this paper finds evidence suggesting that hedge fund investors rationally anticipate future hedge fund performance. Both buy and sell indications of interest arrive following...