A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member's working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member's personal preferences. The plan's optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired profile of...

Luxury bequests impart systematic effects of age to an investor's optimal allocation: the expected percentage allocation to equities rises throughout retirement. When bequests are luxuries the marginal utility of bequests declines more slowly than the marginal utility of consumption. This is...

Assuming the loss aversion framework of Tversky and Kahneman (1992), stochastic investment and labour income processes, and a path-dependent fund target, we show that the optimal investment strategy for defined contribution pension plan members is a target-driven ‘threshold’ strategy,...

In this article we formulate and solve the optimal design problem of a defined contribution public pension fund, in a highly stylized but still rather general non-stationary framework. We adopt the viewpoint of a benevolent social planner who aims at treating in a fair manner the successive...

A model of heterogenous firms facing idiosyncratic risk is proposed which generates an equity premium of 6 per cent and a risk-free rate of 1.5 per cent even if aggregate returns are risk-free. The premium in this model reflects diminishing returns-to-scale and the fact that equity shares are...

The presence of excess covariance in financial price returns is an accepted empirical fact: the price dynamics of financial assets tend to be more correlated than their fundamentals would justify. We advance an explanation of this fact based on an intertemporal equilibrium multi-assets model of...

Zipf's law states that the number of firms with size greater than S is inversely proportional to S. Most explanations start with Gibrat's rule of proportional growth but require additional constraints. We show that Gibrat's rule, at all firm levels, yields Zipf's law under a balance condition...

This paper studies a Lucas (1978) fruit-tree economy under the assumption that the agents are Choquet expected utility (CEU) rather than standard expected utility decision makers. More specifically, the agents' non-additive beliefs about the economy's dividend payment process are modeled as...

This paper shows that the framework proposed by Barberis and Huang (2009) to incorporate narrow framing and loss aversion into dynamic models of portfolio choice and asset pricing can be extended to also account for probability weighting and for a value function that is convex on losses and...

We study how investor behavior affects the transmission of financial crises. If investors exhibit decreasing relative risk aversion, then negative wealth shocks increase the risk premium required to hold risky assets. We integrate this into a second generation model of currency crises which...