This note shows that an investor who does not hold positive amounts of all available assets is eventually overtaken by a completely diversified rival investor.

We solve analytically the Merton's problem of an investor with time-additive power utility. For general state dynamics, we prove existence of two power series representations of the relevant optimal policies and value functions, which hold for all admissible risk aversion parameters. We...

This paper shows that in financial markets with endogenous asset supply and demand, both rational and noise traders do coexist in the long run. The finding implies that financial markets are neither informationally nor allocationally efficient. While rational traders have a consistently higher...

We argue that the equity premium puzzle stems from a mismatch of applying mental accounting to experiments on risk aversion but not to the standard consumption based asset pricing model. If, as we suggest, one applies mental accounting consistently in both areas the degrees of risk aversions...

We prove that under very weak conditions optimal financial products have to be co-monotone with the inverted state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g. Expected Utility Theory or Prospect Theory. The proof is based on methods...

We use portfolio theory to quantify the efficiency of state-level sectoral patterns of production in the United States. On the basis of observed growth in sectoral value-added output, we calculate for each state the efficient frontier for investments in the real economy. We study how rapidly...

We evaluate how non-normality of asset returns and the temporal evolution of volatility and higher moments affects the conditional allocation of wealth. We show that if one neglects these aspects, as would be the case in a mean-variance allocation, a significant cost would arise. The performance...

The prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the cumulative prospect theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) are descriptive models for decision making that summarize several violations of the expected utility theory. This paper gives a survey of applications of prospect theory to the...

Three types of agents acting on different information sets are considered: fully informed agents, insiders, and outsiders. Differences in information quality are shown to affect the properties of their optimal portfolios. For an outsider, the share of wealth invested in the stock is decreasing...

In this study, we first estimate the level of financial integration for twenty five emerging stock markets over the last decade. Using a multivariate GARCH(1,1)-M return generating model allowing for partial market integration as well as for the pricing of systematic emerging market risk, we...