Value at Risk (VaR) has emerged in recent years as a standard tool to measure and control the risk of trading portfolios. Yet, existing theoretical analyses of the optimal behavior of a trader subject to VaR limits have produced a negative view of VaR as a risk-control tool. In particular, VaR...

This paper constructs a representative agent supporting the equilibrium allocation in ¡°event-tree¡± economies with time-additive preferences and possibly incomplete securities markets. If the equilibrium allocation is Pareto optimal, this construction gives the usual linear welfare...

Value at Risk (VaR) has emerged in recent years as a standard tool to measure and control the risk of trading portfolios. Yet, existing theoretical analyses of the optimal behavior of a trader subject to VaR limits have produced a negative view of VaR as a risk-control tool. In particular, VaR...

We develop a new methodology to measure conditional dependency between time series each driven by complicated marginal distributions. We achieve this by using copula functions that link marginal distributions, and by expressing the parameter of the copula as a function of predetermined...

We develop a simple rational model of active portfolio management that provides a natural benchmark against which to evaluate observed relationship between returns and fund flows. Many effects widely regarded as anomalous are consistent with this simple explanation. In the model, investments...

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study. Data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We analyze a...

When information is costly, a seller may wish to prevent prospective buyers from acquiring information, for the cost of information acquisition is ultimately borne by the seller. A seller can achieve the desired prevention of information acquisition through posted-price selling, by offering...

We consider consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency at any order of a given portfolio with respect to all possible portfolios constructed from a set of assets. We propose and justify approaches based on simulation and the block bootstrap to achieve valid inference in a time series...

Standard tests designed to identify mutual funds with non-zero alphas are problematic, in that they do not adequately account for the presence of lucky funds. Lucky funds have significant estimated alphas, while their true alphas are equal to zero. To address this issue, this paper quantifies...