Resemblance in portfolio composition of sheltered and unsheltered equity funds held by open-end U.S. investment companies is consistent with their practice of identifying sheltered vs. unsheltered claims on the same portfolios instead of segregating portfolios based on shareholders' tax...

We prove the existence of statistical arbitrage opportunities for jump-diffusion models of stock prices when the jump-size distribution is assumed to have finite moments. We show that to obtain statistical arbitrage, the risky asset holding must go to zero in time. Existence of statistical...

Various studies report that investing in “sin stocks”, that is firms which make money from human vice, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling and weapons, has historically delivered significantly positive abnormal returns. This finding has inspired the hypothesis that sin stocks are being...

Studies of household stock market participation report low participation rates. The explanations cited are that the fixed costs associated with participation and high risk aversion discourage households from buying stocks. However, the low participation rate findings are unchallenged. We argue...

This theoretical paper seeks to correct a common error about the effect of personal taxation on the expected pre-tax return earned on equity portfolios held by mutual funds in tax-sheltered retirement plans such as IRA and Keogh (401-k). Contrary to the prevailing view, the analysis reveals that...

Since the work by Stigler on the economics of information in the early 1960s, economists have paid closer attention to the role of search for information. However, search methods are not considered in the theory of portfolio choice. We present a model of investor search behavior in order to...

In the post-crisis era, financial institutions seem to be more aware of the risks posed by extreme events. Even though there are attempts to adapt methodologies drawing from the vast academic literature on the topic, there is also skepticism that fat-tailed models are needed. In this paper, we...