There is a significant potential demand in many countries around the world for a flexible product to manage individual longevity risk arising from the prevalence of defined contribution pensions, uncertainty in improvements in life expectancy, potential reductions in public pensions and a lack...

In an environment with stocks and short-term debt, random changes in the risk-reward frontier produce hedging demands for equities, implying that portfolio policies supporting optimal life-cycle consumption are rarely mean-variance efficient. Pursuing optimal life-cycle portfolio policies is...

We extend Samuelson's (1969) discrete-time dynamic consumption and investment optimization problem to the case where the investor is intolerant of any decline in her standard of living. This constraint represents a strong form of habit formation such that the consumption rate is non-decreasing...

This paper provides (i) new results on the structure of optimal portfolios, (ii) economic insights on the behavior of the hedging components and (iii) simulation-based methods for numerical implementation of allocation rules. The core of our approach relies on closed-form solutions for...

Traditional factor models are widely used to estimate the risk and measure the performance of mutual funds. But, these models rely on the assumption of static exposures, whereas mutual fund factor exposures are likely to vary over time. Existing approaches lack either the ability to account for...

Markowitz's (1952) portfolio theory has permeated financial institutions over the past 50 years. Assuming that returns are normally distributed, Markowitz suggests that portfolio optimization should be performed in a mean-variance framework. With the emergence of hedge funds and their...

Institutional fund managers generally rebalance using ad hoc methods such as calendar basis or tolerance band triggers. We propose a different framework that quantifies the cost of a rebalancing strategy in terms of risk-adjusted returns net of transaction costs. We then develop an optimal...

In this paper, we propose a method for hedge fund replication using a factor-based model supplemented with a series of risk and return constraints that implicitly target all the moments of the hedge fund return distribution. We use the approach to replicate the monthly returns of ten broad hedge...

Employing main and sector-specific CDS indices from the North American and European CDS market and performing mean-variance out-of-sample analyses for conservative and aggressive investors over the period from 2006 to 2014, this paper analyzes portfolio benefits of adding corporate CDS indices...

Many investors assign part of their funds to asset managers of mutual funds who are given the task of beating a benchmark. Asset managers usually face a constraint on maximum Tracking Error Volatility (TEV), imposed by the risk management office to keep the risk of the portfolio close to that of...