Accepted wisdom, assuming capital market equilibrium and low cash returns, advises investors to hold optimal portfolios containing little cash. But credit crunches - periods of non-price credit rationing when effective cash yields are very high - happen in the real world. Because of this, it is...

This paper presents a present-biased general equilibrium model that explains many features of bond behavior. Present-biased investors increase (decrease) short-term (long-term) hedge demands compared to standard preferences. Hence, present bias drives up (down) short-term bond prices (yields)...

Many monetary studies on the portfolio balance effect omit its impact to equity returns. Motivated through a simple general equilibrium model, we study how changes in the bond supply affect the overall equity market. Our model predicts that exogenous increases (decreases) in the bond supply...

Discount rates affect stock prices directly via the discount-rate channel or indirectly via the cash-flow channel because expected future cash-flow growth varies with the discount rates. The traditional Macaulay duration captures the effect from the discount-rate channel. I propose a novel...

Procyclical assets tend to rise in value when the economy is expanding and fall with the advent of a recession. Countercyclical assets are instead negatively correlated with the state of the economy. Despite the use of optimization methods, hedging, and ad hoc rebalancing techniques most...

We provide a new portfolio decomposition formula that sheds light on the economics of portfolio choice for investors following the mean-variance (MV) criterion. We show that the number of components of a dynamic portfolio strategy can be reduced to two: the first is preference free and hedges...

We provide a rationale for window dressing where investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers take a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which...

We provide a rationale for window dressing where investors respond to conflicting signals of managerial ability inferred from a fund's performance and its disclosed portfolio holdings. We contend that window dressers take a risky bet on their performance during a reporting delay period, which...

This paper revisits the puzzle of low returns on Swiss Franc assets using a new data set of portfolio holdings of residents and non residents at Swiss banks. The main findings are as follows. First, we find that the return anomaly is present only for fixed income assets and not for equity....