This paper uses Hansen and Jagannathan's (1991) volatility bounds to evaluate models with idiosyncratic consumption risk. I show that idiosyncratic risk does not change the volatility bounds at all when consumers have CRRA preferences and the distribution of the idiosyncratic shock is...

Do investors confuse the quality of a firm with its attractiveness as an investment? If so, shares of well-run companies will be bid up too high and subsequently earn negative abnormal returns. Our analysis of Fortune magazine's annual survey of quot;America's Most Admired Companiesquot; for...

We consider the mean-variance hedging problem when asset prices follow ItÆ processes in an incomplete market framework. The hedging numÊraire and the variance-optimal martingale measure appear to be a key tool for characterizing the optimal hedging strategy (see GouriÊroux et al. 1996;...

In a complete market with a constant interest rate and a risky asset, which is a linear diffusion process, we are interested in the discrete time hedging of a European vanilla option with payoff function f. As regards the perfect continuous hedging, this discrete time strategy induces, for the...

This paper solves the following problem of mathematical finance: to find a solution to the problem of maximizing utility from terminal wealth of an agent with a random endowment process, in the general, semimartingale model for incomplete markets, and to characterize it via the associated dual...

Savers with uncertain life spans cannot stick to long-term investment plans when they invest directly in liquid assets. Before horizons are known, all savers will plan to roll over their short-term assets if returns turn out high. Ex post, the short-term investors will consume their liquid...

We consider a pension plan with the option of early retirement, and paid benefits $\Psi (S,t)$ based on salary S at the time of retirement, but with guaranteed minimum; $S=S(t)$ is a Markov process. Denote by V(S,t) the financial value of the retirement benefits; its formal definition is given...

The issue of bonus in life insurance is considered in a model framework where the traditional set-up is extended by letting the experience basis (mortality, interest, etc.) be stochastic. A novel definition of the technical surplus on an insurance contract is proposed, and basic principles for...

We find an exact asymptotics of the ruin probability $\Psi (u)$ when the capital of insurance company is invested in a risky asset whose price follows a geometric Brownian motion with mean return a and volatility $\sigma0$. In contrast to the classical case of non-risky investments where the...

This paper analyzes the recommendations of common stocks made by the investment newsletters followed by the Hulbert Financial Digest. We conclude that, taken as a whole, the securities that newsletters recommend do not outperform appropriate benchmarks. Our data provide modest evidence that the...