In this paper, I obtain new measures of the value of active portfolio management by forming replicating portfolios. These measures allow for a separate evaluation of fund managers' strategic and tactical decisions. I also obtain new evidence on the value of trading by decomposing it into...

This paper explores the profitability of portfolio-based momentum strategies. The data consists of all NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stocks on the CRSP database. The analysis considers the period July 1963 to December 2002 and the tests are performed on portfolios formed on industry, size and...

This paper studies the relation between fund performance and the fund manager's investment strategy, which is based on the characteristics of the portfolio. The results show that neither momentum characteristics nor the valuation of stocks can explain differences in fund performance. However,...

Behavioral economics provides several motivations for the common observation that agents appear somewhat unwilling to deviate from recent choices: salience, inertia, the formation of habits, the use of rules of thumb, or the locking in on certain modes of behavior due to learning by doing. This...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...

This paper proposes that the introduction of non-redundant assets can endogenously modify trader participation in financial markets, which can lead to a lower market premium and a higher interest rate. We demonstrate this mechanism in a tractable exchange economy with endogenous participation....

Bernardo and Ledoit (2000) develop a very appealing framework to compute pricing bounds based on the so-called gain-loss ratio. Their method has many advantages and very interesting properties and so far one important drawback: the complexity of the numerical computation of the pricing bounds....

This paper analyzes how bond option prices are affected by different types of monetary policy. Analytical results from a general equilibrium model with sticky wages show that employment or output targeting typically give lower bond option prices than inflation targeting. -- inflation targeting ;...