Many institutional investors depend on the returns they generate to fund their operations and liabilities. How do these investors' financial conditions affect the management of their portfolios? We address this issue using the insurance industry because insurers are large investors for which...

We use a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using...

This paper compares several investment strategies designed to exploit the low-beta anomaly. Although the notion of buying low-beta stocks and selling high-beta stocks is natural, a choice is necessary with respect to the relative weighting of high-beta stocks and low-beta stocks in the...