Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependence between her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminal payoff . Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to a rather concentrated...

We study the pricing and hedging of derivative securities with uncertainty about the volatility of the underlying asset. Rather than taking all models from a prespecified class equally seriously, we penalise less plausible ones based on their "distance" to a reference local volatility model. In...

This paper introduces a model-free decomposition of S&P 500 forward market index returns in terms of realized and implied dispersion, downside, and tail risk using option portfolios. The decomposition lends itself by construction to learn about the different sources of risk in the market return,...

Despite clear evidence of correlations between financial and medical statuses and decisions, most models treat financial and health-related choices separately. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a tractable dynamic framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio...

We derive representations for the stock price drift and volatility in the equilibrium of agents with arbitrary, heterogeneous utility functions and with the aggregate dividend following an arbitrary Markov diffusion. We introduce a new, intrinsic characteristic of the aggregate dividend process...

We develop alternative models for hedging yield curve risk and test them by hedging US Treasury bond portfolios through note/bond futures. We show that traditional implementations of models based on principal component analysis, duration vectors and key rate duration lead to high exposure to...

Reference-dependent preference models assume that agents derive utility from deviations of consumption from benchmark levels, rather than from consumption levels. These references can be either backward-looking (as explicit in the Habit literature) or forward-looking (as implicitly suggested by...

Following Levy and Roll [2010], we posit that the market portfolio is the efficient tangent Markowitz portfolio, i.e., it is mean-variance efficient. We then reverse engineer the expected returns and variance terms with constraints imposed by empirical data on a hierarchy of asset baskets. This...

The aim of this study is to examine whether securitized real estate returns reflect direct real estate returns or general stock market returns using international data for the U.S., U.K., and Australia. In contrast to previous research, which has generally relied on overall real estate market...

We study positional portfolio management strategies in which the manager maximizes an expected utility function written on the cross-sectional rank (position) of the portfolio return. The objective function reflects the manager's goal to be well-ranked among competitors. To implement positional...