The presence of illiquid assets, such as human wealth or a family owned business, complicates the problem of portfolio choice. This paper is concerned with the problem of optimal asset allocation and consumption in a continuous time model when one asset cannot be traded. This illiquid asset,...

We address potential strengths and weaknesses of alternative protection schemes, which can be adopted as a ‘default option' in a private, third pillar, pension product. In light of the observed behavior of savers adopting the ‘default option' at international level, we perform a comparative...

This paper shows how to decompose weakly stationary time series into the sum, across time scales, of uncorrelated components associated with different degrees of persistence. In particular, we provide an Extended Wold Decomposition based on an isometric scaling operator that makes averages of...

We revisit the relation between equity returns and financial leverage through the lens of a trade-off model with costly capital structure rebalancing. The model provides a “lookalike” Modigliani-Miller equation that predicts that expected equity returns depend on whether a firm's leverage is...

We view economic time series as the result of a cascade of shocks occurring at different times and different frequencies (scales). We suggest that economic relations that are found to be elusive when using raw data may hold true for different layers (details) in the cascade of economic shocks....