This paper provides a novel five-component decomposition of optimal dynamic portfolio choice. It reveals the simultaneous impacts from market incompleteness and wealth-dependent utilities. The decomposition leads to implementation via either closed-form solutions or Monte Carlo simulations. With...

Replicating portfolios have recently emerged as an important tool in the life insurance industry, used for the valuation of companies' liabilities. This paper presents a replicating portfolio (RP) model for approximating life insurance liabilities as closely as possible. We minimize the L1 error...

This paper examines a canonical stochastic overlapping generations model with dynamically complete markets. Belief differences lead agents to place bets against each other and so wealth shifts across agents and across generations. Such changes in the wealth distribution strongly affect prices of...

Many bond portfolio managers argue that bond laddering tends to outperform other bond investment strategies because it reduces both market price risk and reinvestment risk for a bond portfolio in the presence of interest rate uncertainty. Despite the popularity of bond ladders as a strategy for...

DeMiguel, Garlappi, and Uppal (Review of Financial Studies, 22 (2009), 1915-1953) showed that in the stock market, it is difficult for an optimized portfolio constructed using mean-variance analysis to outperform a simple equally-weighted portfolio because of estimation error. In this paper, we...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...

We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

In this paper we examine the effect of collateral requirements on the prices of long-lived assets. We consider a Lucas-style infinite-horizon exchange economy with heterogeneous agents and collateral constraints. There are two trees in the economy which can be used as collateral for short-term...

We develop a new approach for evaluating performance across hedge funds. Our approach allows for performance comparisons between models that are misspecified – a common feature given the numerous factors that drive hedge fund returns. The empirical results show that the standard models used in...

We develop a novel approach to jointly examine skill, scale, and value added across individual funds. We find that the value added is (i) positive for the vast majority of funds, and (ii) close to its optimal level after an adjustment period possibly due to investors' learning. We also show that...