A typical household has a home mortgage as its most significant financial contract. The form of this contract is correspondingly important. This paper studies the choice between a fixed-rate (FRM) and an adjustable-rate (ARM) mortgage. In an environment with uncertain inflation, a nominal FRM...

Over the period 1975 to 2005, the US dollar (particularly in relation to the Canadian dollar) and the euro and Swiss franc (particularly in the second half of the period) have moved against world equity markets. Thus these currencies should be attractive to risk-minimizing global equity...

Conventional wisdom holds that conservative investors should avoid exposure to foreign currency risk. Even if they hold foreign equities, they should hedge the currency exposure of these positions and should hold only domestic Treasury bills. This paper argues that the conventional wisdom may be...

Much recent work has documented evidence for predictability of asset returns. We show how such predictability can affect the portfolio choices of long-lived investors who value wealth not for its own sake but for the consumption their wealth can support. We develop an approximate solution method...

This paper proposes and implements a new approach to a classic unsolved problem in financial economics: the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem of a long-lived investor facing time-varying investment opportunities. The investor is assumed to be infinitely-lived, to have recursive...

If household portfolios are constrained by borrowing and short-sales restrictions asset markets, then alternative retirement savings systems may affect household welfare by relaxing these constraints. This paper uses a calibrated partial-equilibrium model of optimal life-cycle portfolio choice...

This paper constructs an index of financial sophistication that, in comprehensive data on Swedish households, best explains a set of three investment mistakes: underdiversification, risky share inertia, and the tendency to sell winning stocks and hold losing stocks (the disposition effect). The...

This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong...

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky...

We show that reaching for yield -- a tendency to take more risk when the real interest rate declines while the risk premium remains constant -- results from imposing a sustainable spending constraint on an otherwise standard infinitely lived investor with power utility. When the interest rate is...