We develop a liability driven investment framework that incorporates downside risk penalties for not meeting liabilities. The shortfall between the asset and liabilities can be valued as an option which swaps the value of the endogenously determined optimal portfolio for the value of the...

We present a model of optimal allocation to liquid and illiquid assets, where illiquidity risk results from the restriction that an asset cannot be traded for intervals of uncertain duration. Illiquidity risk leads to increased and state-dependent risk aversion, and reduces the allocation to...

American university and college endowments now hold close to one-third of their portfolios in private equity and hedge funds. We estimate the implied beliefs of endowments about alternative assets' returns relative to equities and bonds. At the end of 2012, the typical endowment believes that...

Based on large-scale survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we show that individual portfolio decisions are influenced by a variety of traits and facets traditionally investigated in the field of personality psychology. Two personality traits that taken...

We develop a structural econometric model to elicit household-specific expectations about future financial asset returns and risk attitudes by using data on observed portfolio holdings and self-assessed willingness to bear financial risk. Our framework assumes that household portfolios are...

We study the inflation hedging ability of individual stocks. While the poor inflation hedging ability of the aggregate stock market has long been documented, there is considerable heterogeneity in how individual stock returns covary with inflation. Stocks with good inflation-hedging abilities...

We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) from 1998 to 2007 to provide new insights on the evolution of US households' willingness to undertake portfolio risk. Specifically, we consider four alternative measures of portfolio risk, based on two definitions of portfolio – a narrow one,...