Contrary to what traditional asset pricing would imply, a strategy that bets against beta, by going long in low beta stocks and short in high beta stocks, tends to outperform the market. We consider a market in which diversity is maintained, i.e. no single stock can dominate the entire market,...

We construct mean-variance portfolios using a factor model approach. We show the importance of portfolio allocation for large unbalanced equity data sets using the full CRSP database. We compare the performance of our portfolio construction methodology to the 1/N naive diversification strategy,...

This paper studies equilibrium in a pure exchange economy with unobservable Markov switching consumption growth regimes and regime-dependent preferences. Variations in risk attitudes have fundamental effects on the structure of equilibrium. Explicit solutions are provided for the market price of...

Variance after-effect is a perceptual bias in the dynamic assessment of variance. Experimental evidence shows that perceived variance is decreased after prolonged exposure to high variance and increased after exposure to low variance. We introduce this effect in an otherwise standard financial...