We study the consumption and investment choice of an agent in a continuous-time economy with a riskless asset, several risky financial assets, and two consumption goods, namely a perishable and a durable good with an uncertain price evolution. Assuming lognormal prices and a multiplicatively...

Existing studies of household stock trading using administrative data offer conflicting results: discount brokerage accounts exhibit excessive trading, while retirement accounts show inactivity. This paper uses population-wide data from PSID and SCF to examine the overall extent of household...

We investigate the optimal investment and consumption choice of individual investors with uncertain future labor income operating in a financial market with stochastic interest rates. Since the present value of the individual's future income is a main determinant of the optimal behavior and this...

We characterize the solution to the consumption and investment problem of a power utility investor in a continuous-time dynamically complete market with stochastic changes in the opportunity set. Under stochastic interest rates the investor optimally hedges against changes in the term structure...

With constrained portfolios contingent claims do not generally have a unique price that rules out arbitrage opportunities. Earlier studies have demonstrated that when there are constraints on the hedge portfolio, a no-arbitrage price interval for any contingent claim exists. I consider the more...

In a finite time horizon, incomplete market, continuous-time setting with dividends and investor incomes governed by arithmetic Brownian motions, we derive closed-form solutions for the equilibrium risk-free rate and stock price for an economy with a finite set of heterogeneous CARA investors...

Is wider access to stockholding opportunities related to reduced wealth inequality, given that it creates challenges for small and less sophisticated investors? Counterfactual analysis is used to study the influence of changes in the US stockholder pool and economic environment, on the...

This paper investigates the role of skewness preference in cross-sectional pricing of NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stocks over the long sample period of January 1926-December 2005 as well as two subsamples. Portfolio-level analyses and the firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and...

We investigate, using the 2002 US Health and Retirement Study, individuals' insecurity and expectations about terrorism, and their effects on household financial decisions. We find that those without any military experience, the less educated, the more religious and females worry a lot about...

Utility-maximizing consumption and investment strategies in closed form are unknown for realistic settings involving portfolio constraints, incomplete markets, and potentially a high number of state variables. Standard numerical methods are hard to implement in such cases. We propose a numerical...