Recently much progress has been made in developing optimal portfolio choice models accomodating time-varying opportunity sets, but unless investors are unreasonably risk averse, optimal holdings include unreasonably large equity positions. One reason is that most studies assume investors behave...

This paper examines the specification errors of several asset pricing models using the methodology of Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) and a common data set. The models are the CAPM, the Consumption CAPM, the Jagannathan and Wang (1996) conditional CAPM, the Campbell (1996) dynamic asset pricing...

This paper analyzes optimal portfolio decisions of long-horizon investors with undiversifiable labor income risk and exogenous expected retirement and lifetime horizons. It shows that the fraction of savings optimally invested in stocks is unambiguously larger for employed investors than for...

The Euler equations of consumption are tested on the household consumption of non-durables and services, reconstructed from the CEX database. The estimated relative risk aversion coefficient of the representative household decreases, and the estimated unexplained mean equity premium decreases,...

This paper suggests that adverse selection problems in competitive annuity markets can generate quantity constrained equilibria in which some agents whose length of lifetime is uncertain find it advantageous to accumulate capital privately. This occurs despite the higher rates of return on...

This paper reconsiders the effects of taxation on risky assets, recognizing the importance of variations in asset prices. We show that earlier analyses which assumed that depreciation rates are constant and that the future price of capital goods is known with certainty are very misleading, as...

Barber and Odean study the relationship between trading activity and returns. They find that households who trade more have a lower net return than other households. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to...

Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers" --delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer term investments--makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive advantage. "Short termism"...