In an environment with stocks and short-term debt, random changes in the risk-reward frontier produce hedging demands for equities, implying that portfolio policies supporting optimal life-cycle consumption are rarely mean-variance efficient. Pursuing optimal life-cycle portfolio policies is...

Modern portfolio theory produces optimal portfolios from estimates of expected returns and a covariance matrix. Such optimal portfolios are efficient portfolios, that is they provide the maximum level of expected return for a given level of risk. We present a method for portfolio selection based...

A new methodology for calibrating parameters when working with intractable, dynamic structural models is developed. A straight-forward extension also allows for formal estimation and hypothesis testing in a Generalized Method of Moment framework. The method is based on multigrid techniques used...

Many owners of growing privately-held firms make operational and financial decisions in an effort to maximize the expected present value of the proceeds from an Initial Public Offering (IPO). We ask: What is the right time to make an IPO and How should operational and financial decisions be...

In this research, a first order Markov model is built from a corpus of bagana music, a traditional lyre from Ethiopia. Different ways in which low order Markov models can be used to build quality assessment metrics for an optimization algorithm are explained. These are then implemented in a...

I introduce and evaluate a new stochastic simulation method for dynamic economic models. It is based on recent work in the operations research and engineering literatures (Van Roy et. al, 1997; Powell, 2007; Bertsekas, 2011). The baseline method involves rewriting the household's dynamic program in...

In facility layout problems, a major concern is the optimal design or remodeling of the facilities of an organization. The decision maker's objective is to arrange the facility in an optimal way, so that the interaction among functions (i.e. machines, inventories, persons) and places (i.e....

In facility layout problems, a major concern is the optimal design or remodeling of the facilities of an organization. The decision maker’s objective is to arrange the facility in an optimal way, so that the interaction among functions (i.e. machines, inventories, persons) and places (i.e....

This note examines a numerical approach for computing American option prices in the lognormal jump–diffusion context. The approach uses the known transition density of the process to build a discrete-time, homogenous Markov chain to approximate the target jump–diffusion process. Numerical...

Programs that work very well in optimizing convex functions very often perform poorly when the problem has multiple local minima or maxima. They are often caught or trapped in the local minima/maxima. Several methods have been developed to escape from being caught in such local optima. The...