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...

This paper explores the application of contingent claims analysis (CCA) to two quot;hotquot; issues in life-cycle finance: (1) investing for retirement and (2) deciding when, if ever, to switch careers. Participants in individual retirement accounts do not have the time or the knowledge to make...

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...

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 conjecture that partially segmented stock indexes that are characterized by low correlation with the world market are mainly priced by local factors and should produce abnormal returns relative to a global asset-pricing model. This implies a negative relation between correlation and future...

We quantify disagreement about the economy with ex-ante measures of divergence of opinion among economic forecasters and investigate if economic disagreement has a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. We find a significant disagreement premium of 7.2% per...

This paper shows that market breadth, i.e. the difference between the average number of rising stocks and the average number of falling stocks within a portfolio, is a robust predictor of future stock returns on market and industry portfolios for 64 countries for the period between 1973 and...

Frazzini and Pedersen (2014) document that a betting against beta strategy that takes long positions in low-beta stocks and short positions in high-beta stocks generates a large abnormal return of 6.6% per year and they attribute this phenomenon to funding liquidity risk. We demonstrate that...

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...