Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

Current approaches to asset-liability management employ a sequence of distinct procedures to value liabilities and determine the asset allocation. First, a discount rate that is usually dic-tated by accounting standards is used to value liabilities. Second, the asset allocation is determined by...

This paper considers the asset-allocation strategies open to members of defined- contribution pension plans. We investigate a model that incorporates three sources of risk: asset risk and salary (or labour-income) risk in the accumulation phase; and interest-rate risk at the point of retirement....

One can consider the concept of market neutrality for hedge funds as having breadth and depth: breadth reflects the number of market risks to which a fund is neutral, while depth reflects the completeness of the neutrality of the fund to market risks. We focus on market neutrality depth, and...

Allowing for a richer information structure than usual, we show that rational traders’ calculation with short-term price fluctuations may heavily influence their behaviour even if the interim price is not influenced by non-rational agents i.e. there is no noise trader risk. Instead, traders...

This paper surveys asset allocation methods that extend the traditional approach. An important feature of the traditional approach is that measures the risk and return tradeoff in terms of mean and variance of final wealth. However, there are also other important features that are not always...

This paper offers two main contributions. First, it shows how the Baxter and Jermann (1997) claim that, once we consider human capital risk, the international diversification puzzle is worse than we think, is based on an econometric misspecification rejected by the data. Second, it outlines how,...

We study a simple rational expectations (RE) model whose asset pricing implications address some of the short-run mispricings, informational inefficiencies, and overreactions observed in real markets, without a need to resort to behavioral assumptions. We accomplish this by relying on the...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...