Structural positions are very common in investment practice. A structural position is defined as a permanent overweighting of a riskier asset class relative to a prespecified benchmark portfolio. The most prominent example for a structural position is the equity bias in a balanced fund that...

Estimation risk is known to have a huge impact on mean/variance (MV) optimized portfolios, which is one of the primary reasons to make standard Markowitz optimization unfeasible in practice. Several approaches to incorporate estimation risk into portfolio selection are suggested in the earlier...

As past research suggest, currency exposure risk is a main source of overall risk of international diversified portfolios. Thus, controlling the currency risk is an important instrument for controlling and improving investment performance of international investments. This study examines the...

This paper investigates retirees' optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

We analyze portfolio policies for investors who invest optimally for given investment horizons with respect to Conditional Value-at-Risk constraints. We account for non-normally distributed, skewed, and leptokurtic asset return distribution due to regime shifts. The focus is on standard CRRA...

This paper solves the dynamic asset allocation problem under stock return predictability based on the dividend price ratio with regime shifts and parameter uncertainty in a fully Bayesian framework. Intertemporal hedging demands are simultaneously induced by predictability, regime shifts,...

This paper examines the life-cycle impact of preference factors as experience, loss aversion, and narrow framing on explaining the empirical low stock market participation, low stock share conditional on participation, and positive relationships between financial wealth and participation as well...

Most defined contribution pension plans pay benefits as lump sums, yet the US Treasury has recently encouraged firms to protect retirees from outliving their assets by converting a portion of their plan balances into longevity income annuities (LIA). These are deferred annuities which initiate...

In the wake of the financial crisis and continued volatility in international capital markets, there is growing interest in mechanisms that can protect people against retirement account volatility. This paper explores the consequences for savers' wellbeing of implementing market-based retirement...

The solution to dynamic portfolio choice models can be formulated in terms of a value function by the Bellman principle of optimality, which reduces the multi-period optimal policy choice problem to a sequence of one-period maximization problems. For two adjacent periods, economists compute the...