This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of...

The portfolio selection problem is traditionally modelled by two different approaches. The first one is based on an axiomatic model of risk-averse preferences, where decision makers areassumed to possess an expected utility function and the portfolio choice consists in maximizing the expected...

We consider consistent tests for stochastic dominance efficiency at any order of a given portfolio with respect to all possible portfolios constructed from a set of assets. We justify block bootstrap approaches to achieve valid inference in a time series setting. The test statistics are computed...

Starting from the reward-risk model for portfolio selection introduced in De Giorgi (2004), we derive the reward-risk Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) analogously to the classical mean-variance CAPM. The reward-risk portfolio selection arises froman axiomatic definition of reward and risk...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to identify tax reforms that will be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the...

We analyze the impact of the most recent global financial crisis (GFC) on the seven most important Latin American stock markets. Our mean-variance analysis shows that the markets are significantly less volatile and, in general, investors prefer to invest in the post-GFC period. Our results from...

Real estate platforms provide a new source of data which has already been used as a substitute for transaction data in hedonic regression applications. This paper asks whether it is valid to do so in the established research areas of (1) willingness to pay estimation, (2) automated valuations,...

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expectedutility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependencebetween her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminalpayo. Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to arather concentrated distribution,...

This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid...