We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

This paper analyzes the nominal yields of UK gilt-edged securities ("gilts") based on a Keynesian perspective, which holds that the short-term interest rate is the primary driver of the long-term interest rate. Quarterly data are used to model gilts' nominal yields. These models bring to light...

Atmospheric pollution was an important side effect of coal-fired industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In Britain emissions of black smoke were on the order of fifty times as high as they were a century later. In this paper we examine the effects of these emissions on child development by...

Atmospheric pollution was an important side effect of coal-fired industrialisation in the nineteenth century. In Britain emissions of black smoke were on the order of fifty times as high as they were a century later. In this paper we examine the effects of these emissions on child development by...

Using five centuries of annual data from preindustrial England, Zivot-Andrews tests reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in real GDP. The tests identify structural breaks at the start of the Black Death (1348) and the Wars of the Roses (1457). The tests conclude that real GDP was otherwise...

The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES ) in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

This paper analyses the risk and return of loans portfolios in a joint setting. I develop a model to obtain the distribution of loans returns. I use this model to describe the investment opportunity set of lenders using mean-variance analysis with a Value at Risk constraint. I also obtain closed...

I estimate and evaluate a model with a representative agent who is concerned that the persistence properties of her baseline model of consumption and inflation are misspecified. Coping with model uncertainty, she discovers a pessimistically biased worst-case model that dictates her behavior. I...

This paper estimates and tests the smooth ambiguity model of Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005, 2009) based on stock market data. We introduce a novel methodology to estimate the conditional expectation which characterizes the impact of a decision maker's ambiguity attitude on asset...

Using the expected option-implied variance reduction to measure the sensitivity of stock returns to monetary policy announcement surprises, this paper shows that monetary policy announcements require significant risk compensation in the cross section of equity returns. We present evidence that...