When all financial assets have risky returns, the mean-variance portfolio model is potentially subject to two types of bliss points. One bliss point arises when a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function displays negative marginal utility for sufficiently large end-of-period wealth, such as in...

We examine the implications of arbitrage in a market with many assets. The absence of arbitrage opportunities implies that the linear functionals that give the mean and cost of a portfolio are continuous; hence there exist unique portfolios that represent these functionals. The mean variance...

This paper aims to provide a stochastic, rational expectations extension of Tobin's "Money and Income; Post Hoc Ergo Proper Hoc?". It is well-known that money may Granger-cause real variables even though the joint density function of the real variables is invariant under changes in the...

This paper considers a simple quantitative model of output, interest rate and inflation determination in the United States, and uses it to evaluate alternative rules by which the Fed may set interest rates. The model is derived from optimizing behavior under rational expectations, both on the...

In this paper, we compare the attitude towards current risk of two expected-utility-maximizing investors that are identical except that the first investor will live longer than the" second one. In one of the models under consideration, there are two assets at every period. The" first asset has a...

The market portfolio is in one sense the least important portfolio to provide to investors. In an J-agent one-period stochastic endowment economy, where preferences are quadratic, a social-welfare-minded contract designer would never create a contract that would allow trading the market...

A Bayesian approach is used to investigate a sample's information about a portfolio's degree of inefficiency. With standard diffuse priors, posterior distributions for measures of portfolio inefficiency can concentrate well away from values consistent with efficiency, even when the portfolio is...

The Euler equations derived from a broad range of intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the first two unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. We develop and implement statistical tests of these...

Why do we see nominal contracts in the presence of price level risk? To answer this question, this paper studies an overlapping generations model in which the equilibrium contract form is optimal, given the contracts elsewhere in the economy. Nominal contracts turn out to be optimal in the...

This paper examines the dissemination of market timing information (signals on the overall performance of risky assets relative to the risk free rate). We consider two delivery systems. Under the newsletter delivery system market timing information is disseminated solely through newsletter....