When all financial assets have risky returns, the mean-variance portfolio model is potentially subject to two types of bliss points. One bliss point arises when a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function displays negative marginal utility for sufficiently large end-of-period wealth, such as in...

The market portfolio is in one sense the least important portfolio to provide to investors. In an J-agent one-period stochastic endowment economy, where preferences are quadratic, a social-welfare-minded contract designer would never create a contract that would allow trading the market...

A Bayesian approach is used to investigate a sample's information about a portfolio's degree of inefficiency. With standard diffuse priors, posterior distributions for measures of portfolio inefficiency can concentrate well away from values consistent with efficiency, even when the portfolio is...

The Euler equations derived from a broad range of intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the first two unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. We develop and implement statistical tests of these...

This paper examines the dissemination of market timing information (signals on the overall performance of risky assets relative to the risk free rate). We consider two delivery systems. Under the newsletter delivery system market timing information is disseminated solely through newsletter....

If the elements of the choice set in a decision model involving randomness are not arbitrary, but restricted appropriately, an expected utility ordering of them can be represented by a mean standard deviation ranking function. These restrictions can apply to the form of, or can specify...