Holding more of the riskless asset and insuring the risky asset are two ways to reduce portfolio risk. These methods can be employed jointly. As a result, the amount of insurance selected to indemnify against possible losses from holding a risky asset depends, in general, on the quantities of...

In this article, a general class of deterministic transformations that can be interpreted as changes in risk are identified. This provides a fourth characterization of a Rothschild-Stiglitz increase in risk. In addition, a particular subclass of these transformations, termed simple...

When the return to a risky asset is altered, an investor's optimal portfolio is likely to change. In working out the details of these changes for expected utility maximizing investors, previous research has focused on portfolios composed of one risky and one riskless asset or two independent...

This paper analyzes the effect of wage-rate uncertainty on long-run competitive equilibrium for a labor market made up of heterogeneous workers. The authors show that, if workers are risk-averse, an increase in wage rate uncertainty always lowers aggregate hours of work and increases the...

Illegal tying often occurs when a monopolist jointly sells a product with a complementary requirement, also sold competitively. Along with selling the complement at its competi tive price, this paper shows that profit can increase when a monopoli st lets consumers bundle any amount of the...

We study the comparative statics implications of mean-variance preferences for optimal portfolios. Specifically, we show that all risk-averse mean-variance investors raise their investment in a risky asset in response to a change in that asset's return distribution if and only if the change...

This paper investigates whether or not floating exchange rates add an undesirable level of risk to international investment positions. For investors holding currencies, the authors find that fixed exchange rates are preferred to floating exchange rates, which supports the often-argued case that...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the direction of change in the optimal value of the choice variable following a deterministic transformation of the underlying random variable. Here, the author considers transformations representing either first or second degree stochastically...