Uncertainty and monetary policy decisions in the U.S. interact with one another. Contrary to the common notion that FOMC announcements resolve a non-trivial amount of economic uncertainty, we find that the announcement commands a sizable left-tail premium, which builds up a few days in advance....

We analyze optimal asset allocation in continuous time for a collective of tied-together investors. We rely on a specific collective utility function which dates back to Karatzas (1990), by which the fund manager maximizes the weighted average of expected individual utilities for the investors...

We perform a general equilibrium analysis in a complete markets economy whenthe dividend follows a jump-diffusion process with stochastic volatility. Agents haveCRRA utility, but differ with respect to their degree of risk aversion. The keyoutput of our analysis is the structure of the...

We consider an exchange economy with two heterogeneous stocks and twogroups of investors. Dividends follow diusion processes, with a constant expectedgrowth rate for one stock and a stochastic drift for the other. 'Rationalinvestors' can either observe this stochastic drift without error or...

In this paper we perform a general equilibrium analysis when the dividend followsa jump-diffusion process with stochastic volatility, where both the dividend itselfand its volatility can jump. We work in a complete markets economy and assumethat agents have CRRA utility, but can differ with...

In this paper we study the equilibrium in a heterogeneous economy with twogroups of investors. Over-confident experts incorrectly assume that their signalfor the drift of the dividend process is correlated with the true drift, butinterpret the signal otherwise perfectly. Rational laymen avoid...

Variance contracts permit the trading of ’variance risk’, i.e. the risk that the realizedvariance of stock returns changes randomly over time. We discuss why investorsmight want to trade this type of risk, and why they might prefer a variance contractto standard calls and puts for this...

Model mis-specification can cause substantial utility losses in portfolio planning.In this paper, we compare two approaches to cope with this problem,robust control and learning. We derive the optimal portfolio strategies and theutility losses due to model mis-specification. Surprisingly,...

The observed prices of out-of-the money put options seem too high given standardderivative pricing models. One possible explanation is a Peso problem: crashes (forwhich the payoff of a put is high) are taken into account for pricing, but are under-represented in the data sets used for empirical...

This paper analyzes the properties of and the differences between derivative pricingmodels that include stochastic volatility or stochastic jumps or both of these riskfactors. The focus is on the pricing of European options. In a first step, we discussthe impact of the parameters in stochastic...