The conventional view of regulation is that it exists to constrain corporate activity that harms the public. But amid perceptions of government failure, many now call on corporations to tackle social problems themselves. And in this moment of dissatisfaction with government, powerful asset...

Climate change is a quintessential market failure. Individual companies do not have economic incentives to reduce their carbon emissions and therefore produce more emissions than is socially desirable. However, according to a theory that is gaining increasing support among academics and market...

Firms seem to care a lot about "risk management": the practice of hedging risks whether they are correlated with market risk or not. The standard reasons why widely held corporations might be averse to idiosyncratic risk are based on the principal-agent problem, bankruptcy costs, external...

This paper studies the hedging of price risk when payment dates are uncertain, a problem that frequently occurs in practice. It derives and establishes the variance minimizing dynamic hedging strategy, using forward contracts with different times to maturity. The resulting strategy fully hedges...

Investors are inextricably linked to financial institutions, money managers, and the products they market. Mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), hedge funds, and pension funds manage or hold roughly $55 trillion in combined wealth. This chapter examines these topics with a behavioral...

Asset allocation models have evolved in complexity with the development of modern portfolio theory, but they continue to operate under the assumption of investor rationality and other assumptions that do not hold in the real world. For this reason, academics and industry professionals make...

Around the globe, the gradual move from defined benefit pensions to defined contribution pensions has increased the need for individual retirement planning. Examples of this include U.S. savings rates at historic lows, poor retirement prospects for citizens in developed countries, and the...

In the oversight of most funds, the portfolio manager holds the key decision-making power. Often regarded as foundational to the investment process, a few select managers can attract billions of dollars from investors, giving the managers increased prominence, credibility, and compensation....

Let us suppose that presently unimagined is possible, that “the unexpected may happen” (Marshall, 1920, p. 347). Then “human decisions affecting the future, whether personal, political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation since the basis for making such...

This chapter focuses on the attitude of investors toward financial gains and losses and their decisions on wealth allocation, and how these changes are subject to behavioral factors. The focal point is the integration of behavioral elements into the classic portfolio optimization. Individual...