We consider a life-cycle model with bequest motives, and assume that the individual does not know his/her survival probability and has maxmin utility preferences; we show that it is optimal not to annuitize but to purchase pure life insurance policies instead.

This note gives the conditions on preferences to guarantee the monotonicity of asset prices when the payoffs of the risky asset change in the sense of the Nth stochastic dominance and with an Nth degree increase in risk. Those conditions are expressed in terms of the sign of the successive...

In the present study, I explore the dynamics of the interday stock price reversals. Employing the intraday price data on thirty stocks currently making up the Dow Jones Industrial Index, I document that daily stock returns tend to be higher following the days with relatively large high-to-close...

Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...

Measuring the psychic return of art investments is a debated issue in cultural economics. Several works suggest Jensen’s alpha as a measure of the psychic return. Since Jensen’s alpha is defined in the CAPM framework, its uncritical application as a measure of the psychic return may be...

We identify the conditions where robust mean–variance preferences, which capture ambiguity aversion, are observationally nonequivalent to subjective mean–variance preferences. Conversely, we also provide an example showing that observational equivalence holds regardless of the degree of...

Using a stylized two-period model we compare portfolio solutions from two local solution approaches–the approach of Judd and Guu (2001) and the approach of Devereux and Sutherland (2010, 2011)–with the true nonlinear portfolio solution.

This study establishes necessary conditions for Almost Stochastic Dominance criteria of various orders. These conditions take the form of restrictions on algebraic combinations of moments of the probability distributions in question. The relevant set of conditions depends on the relevant order...

Since the enactment of Pension Protection Act of 2006, lifecycle funds that reduce exposure to stocks with age have rapidly replaced money market funds as the most commonly nominated default investment options for participant-directed retirement plans. We examine their appropriateness in meeting...

The use of mixture distributions for modeling asset returns has a long history in finance. New methods of demonstrating support for the presence of mixtures in the multivariate case are provided. The use of a two-component multivariate normal mixture distribution, coupled with shrinkage via a...