In modern portfolio theory, financial portfolios are characterised by a desired property, the ‘reward’, and something undesirable, the ‘risk’. While these properties are commonly identified with mean and variance of returns, respectively, we test alternative specifications like partial...

In this paper we examine the effect of collateral requirements on the prices of long- lived assets. We consider a Lucas-style infinite-horizon exchange economy with hetero- geneous agents and collateral constraints. There are two trees in the economy which can be used as collateral for...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distribution. Finding Omega-optimal portfolios, in particular under realistic constraints like cardinality restrictions, requires to...

The paper examines a game-theoretic model of a financial market in which asset prices are determined endogenously in terms of short-run equilibrium. Investors use general, adaptive strategies depending on the exogenous states of the world and the observed history of the game. The main goal is to...

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

In this paper we consider a canonical stochastic overlapping generations economy with sequentially complete markets. We examine how aggregate and individual shocks translate to changes in the distribution of wealth and how these movements in the wealth distribution affect asset prices and the...