Despite clear evidence of correlations between financial and medical statuses and decisions, most models treat financial and health-related choices separately. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a tractable dynamic framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio...

We develop alternative models for hedging yield curve risk and test them by hedging US Treasury bond portfolios through note/bond futures. We show that traditional implementations of models based on principal component analysis, duration vectors and key rate duration lead to high exposure to...

Reference-dependent preference models assume that agents derive utility from deviations of consumption from benchmark levels, rather than from consumption levels. These references can be either backward-looking (as explicit in the Habit literature) or forward-looking (as implicitly suggested by...

Following Levy and Roll [2010], we posit that the market portfolio is the efficient tangent Markowitz portfolio, i.e., it is mean-variance efficient. We then reverse engineer the expected returns and variance terms with constraints imposed by empirical data on a hierarchy of asset baskets. This...

The aim of this study is to examine whether securitized real estate returns reflect direct real estate returns or general stock market returns using international data for the U.S., U.K., and Australia. In contrast to previous research, which has generally relied on overall real estate market...

During the last decades households in the U.S. have experienced that residential house prices move in a persistent manner, i.e. that returns are positively serially correlated. Since an owner-occupied home is usually the largest investment of a household it is important to understand how...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

Using simulation analysis and property-level data for the U.S., we compare performance metrics for portfolios containing varying proportions of gateway and non-gateway markets. Risk-adjusted performance is found to be similar across types of markets. Gateway markets have higher appreciation and...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...