It has been shown that individual investors are more likely to buy rather than sell stocks that catch their attention. This can lead to suboptimal choices when attention-attracting qualities of a stock may indirectly detract from its utility. This paper tests the causal effect of extreme stock...

Implied volatilities are frequently used to quote the prices of options. The implied volatility of a European option on a particular asset as a function of strike price and time to maturity is known as the asset's volatility surface. Traders monitor movements in volatility surfaces closely. In...

This paper proposes a structural approach to long-horizon asset allocation. In particular, the investor draws inferences about asset returns from a vector autoregression (VAR) with economic restrictions on the intercept, slope, and covariance matrix implied by the long-run risk model of Bansal...

We study the implications of overconfidence for price setting in a monopolistic competition setup with incomplete information. Our price-setters overestimate their abilities to infer aggregate shocks from private signals. The fraction of uninformed firms is endogenous; firms can obtain...

The VIX premium has been shown to hold predictive power over volatility returns and investment risk. Applied within a portfolio construct, this study proposes a conditional strategy which allocates to market and volatility risk. While the strategy is predominantly short volatility, the strategy...

When faced with the challenge of forming a portfolio containing a risky and a risk-free asset, investors tend to apply the same portfolio weights independently of the volatility of the risky asset. This “percentage heuristic” can lead to different levels of portfolio risk when the same...

Pooled annuity products, where the participants share systematic and idiosyncratic mortality risks as well as investment returns and risk, provide an attractive and effective alternative to traditional guaranteed life annuity products. While longevity risk sharing in pooled annuities has...

We consider the frequency and correlation of extreme return observations or “jumps” across equities, Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, currencies, commodities, and real estate. Understanding more about jumps is important to investors as diversification across asset classes is diminished if...

Retail investors pay over twice as much attention to local companies than non-local ones, based on Google searches. News volume and volatility amplify this attention gap. Attention appears causally related to perceived proximity: first, acquisition by a nonlocal company is associated with less...

This paper shows that when an investor optimally rebalances her portfolio, learning about the parameter of the return process still induces a large negative hedging demand even after observing 83 years of asset market data. An investor with a 5-year investment horizon decreases the percentage of...