How should one evaluate investment projects whose CCAPM betas are uncertain? This question is particularly crucial for projects yielding long-lasting impacts on the economy, as is the case for example for many green investments. We define the notion of a certainty equivalent beta. We show that...

This paper explores the quantitative impact of the Baby Boom on stock and bond returns. It constructs a neoclassical growth model with overlapping generations, in which agents make a portfolio decision over risky capital and safe bonds in zero net supply. The model has exogenous technology and...

In this article we construct a model in which agents exhibit preference for ownership with respect to a durable (house). Ownership is modeled as a continuous function of debt service normalized by the price of the house. We study the utility optimization problem of an investor not endowed with...

I develop a Markov model of samrt money chasing past winning funds while taking into account associated costs. The model also allows market capital entry and exit. The steady-state capital allocations re derived using constant transition probabilities. The results sugget that down side risk is...

Because of the uncertainty about how to model the growth process of our economy, there is still much confusion about which discount rates should be used to evaluate actions having long-lasting impacts, as in the contexts of climate change, social security reforms or large public infrastructures...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

While the existence of fixed costs in entering asset markets is the leading rationalization of the "participation puzzle" -the fact that most households do not hold stocks, despite the diversification gains and the significant risk-premium involved-, most motivations of these fixed costs are as...

Bubbles are generally considered the outcome of investor irrationality or informational asymmetry, both objectionable in efficient markets with rational investors. We introduce an Intertemporal-CAPM with market clearing between high- and low-risk-averse rational investors who learn the CAPM...

We define a class of risk-taking-neutral (RTN) background risks. These background risks have the property that they will not alter decisions made with respect to another risk, for individuals with HARA utility. If we wish to compare a decision made with and without some exogenous background...