Our objective in this paper is to examine whether one can use option-implied information to improve the selection of mean-variance portfolios with a large number of stocks, and to document which aspects of option-implied information are most useful for improving their out-of-sample performance....

In a production economy with trade in financial markets motivated by the desire to share labor-income risk and to speculate, we show that speculation increases volatility of asset returns and investment growth, increases the equity risk premium, and reduces welfare. Regulatory measures, such as...

In this article, we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and, through that, on the investment in risky projects, welfare and growth. We find that the welfare gain of financial market openness is not monotonic with respect to investors' risk aversion...

We study the effect of introducing a nonredundant derivative on the volatilities of the stock market return and the locally risk-free interest rate. Our analysis uses a standard, frictionless, full-information, dynamic, continuous-time, general-equilibrium, Lucas endowment economy in which there...

In this paper, we extend the mean-variance portfolio model where expected returns are obtained using maximum likelihood estimation to explicitly account for uncertainty about the estimated expected returns. In contrast to the Bayesian approach to estimation error, where there is only a single...

Returns on international equities are characterized by jumps; moreover, these jumps tend to occur at the same time across countries leading to systemic risk. In this paper, we evaluate whether systemic risk reduces substantially the gains from international diversification. First, in order to...

In this paper we develop a model of intertemporal portfolio choice where an investor accounts explicitly for the possibility of model misspecification. This work is motivated by the difficulty in estimating precisely the probability law for asset returns. Our contribution is to develop a...

In this paper, we wish to evaluate the performance of simple asset-allocation strategies such as allocating 1/N to each of the N assets available. To do this, we compare the out-of-sample performance of such simple allocation rules to about ten models of optimal asset-allocation (including both...

In this paper, we evaluate the out-of-sample performance of the portfolio policy from the sample-based mean-variance portfolio model and the various extensions of this model, designed to reduce the impact of estimation error relative to the benchmark strategy of investing a fraction 1/N of...