Over the past two decades international markets have become more open, leading to a common perception that global capital markets have become more integrated. In this paper, I ask what this integration and its resulting higher correlation would imply about the diversification potential across...

We analyze a large number of industry- and company-level filings of global institutional investors to provide the first comprehensive estimate of foreign investors' U.S. dollar (USD) security holdings and currency hedging practices. We document four stylized facts. First, driven by increasing...

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 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...

We test a Wall Street investment strategy known as pairs trading' with daily data over the period 1962 through 1997. Stocks are matched into pairs according to minimum distance in historical normalized price space. We test the profitability of several trading rules with six-month trading periods...

This paper documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable...

The entitlement to social security retirement benefits is a major component of aggregate household wealth. This paper focuses on the impact of social security annuities on household portfolio allocation, extending existing optimizing models of portfolio allocation to explicitly consider the role...

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...

Target date funds in corporate retirement plans grew from $5B in 2000 to $734B in 2018, partly because federal regulation sanctioned these as default investments in automatic enrollment plans. We show that adopters delegated pension investment decisions to fund managers selected by plan...

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...