<p>This document contains presentation slides for the American Finance Association's Presidential Address of January 4, 2020. The address is based on the paper "Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance."</p><p>The paper: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3550880...</p>

The discounting of future felicity flows transposes to the intertemporal optimization context the assumption of interest-bearing wealth or savings. The validity of the hypothesis has been challenged by several empirical (ir)regularities and by the theoretical implications for human decision...

We propose a simple non-equilibrium model of a financial market as an open system with a possible exchange of money with an outside world and market frictions (trade impacts) incorporated into asset price dynamics via a feedback mechanism. Using a linear market impact model, this produces a...

Present market instabilities have prompted great interest on the characteristics of specific portfolios such as minimum variance and equally- weighted risk contribution portfolios as these portfolios do not rely on the estimate of expected returns. Indeed, in turmoil periods traditional market...

Volatility is usually considered as a synonym for risk. Mainstream financial theory states that higher portfolio volatility is translated into higher expected returns while diversification helps eliminate idiosyncratic risks. This leaves us with an apparent anomaly as low-risk (low-beta) stocks...

Models can be wrong and recognising their limitations is important in financial and economic decision making under uncertainty. Robust strategies, which are least sensitive to perturbations of the underlying model, take uncertainty into account. Finding the explicit set of alternative models...

The Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) has been the cornerstone of the asset allocation for over 40 years. In the past decade though, it led in a rather systematic way to bad investments decisions. One of MPT's main assumptions, investor risk aversion that translates into volatility aversion, biases...

Investors typically measure an asset’s potential to diversify a portfolio by its correlations with the portfolio’s other assets, but correlation is useful only if it provides a good estimate of how an asset’s returns co-occur cumulatively with the other asset returns over the investor’s...

In this paper, we consider an optimal stopping problem that addresses model uncertainty. Model uncertainty is the uncertainty affecting the model assumptions, e.g., the assumed form of the probability distribution, the parameters embedded in the probability distribution. The result presented in...

The investment industry lacks an unified framework for handling derivative instruments in general portfolio management. With the increased use of derivatives, there is a need for a framework that aligns fundamental terminology and concepts. The main challenges with the current practices are...