This paper derives closed-form and numerical solutions for relative risk aversion in a standard consumption-based model enriched with housing. The presence of housing enables the household to hedge against unexpected shocks and may decrease relative risk aversion. In addition, housing may...

Empirical evidence suggests that asset returns correlate more strongly in bear markets than conventional correlation estimates imply. We propose a method for determining complete tail-correlation matrices based on Value-at-Risk (VaR) estimates. We demonstrate how to obtain more efficient...

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...

Most socially responsible investment funds combine a sustainability objective with a tracking error constraint. We characterize the impact of a sustainability constraint on the mean-tracking error efficient frontier and illustrate this on a universe of US stocks for the period 2003–2010.

We prove a formula for the computation of optimal financial investments in an expected utility framework with arbitrary (not necessarily concave) utility functions. This extends classical results on optimal financial investments for strictly concave utility functions and is of importance...

Recent work about risk preferences at the micro level mainly finds that changes in liquid wealth over time do not affect or have a positive effect on the liquid risky asset share. This paper embeds riskless noncapital income in standard portfolio choice models, and shows that exogenous...