This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgeable, multiple risky assets, multiple risky assets, many...

While it is common knowledge that portfolio separation in a continuous-time lognormal market is due to the basic properties of the Gaussian distribution, the usual textbook exposition relies on dynamic programming and thus Itô stochastic calculus and the appropriate regularity conditions. This...

We study an economy populated by three groups of logarithmic agents: Constrained agents subject to a portfolio constraint that limits their risk-taking, unconstrained agents subject to a standard nonnegative wealth constraint, and arbitrageurs with access to uncollateralized credit. Such credit...

We consider the demand for state contingent claims in the presence of a zero-mean, nonhedgeable background risk. An agent is defined to be generalized risk averse if he/she reacts to an increase in background risk by choosing a demand function for contingent claims with a smaller slope. We show...

In the post-crisis period, increased regulation of financial intermediaries led to a significant decline in corporate bond market liquidity. In order to stabilize these markets, policy makers recently proposed that the trading of corporate bonds should be more centralized. In this paper, we show...

We consider an exchange economy with heterogeneous agents and multiple assets and investigate the coupled dynamics of assets' prices and agents' wealth. We assume that agents have heterogeneous beliefs and invest on each asset a fraction of wealth proportional to its expected dividends. Our main...

Markowitz and Sharpe won the Nobel Prize in Economics more than a decade ago for the development of Mean-Variance analysis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). In the year2002, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for the development of Prospect Theory....

Under the assumption of normally distributed returns, we analyzewhether the Cumulative Prospect Theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) is consistent with the Capital Asset Pricing Model. We find that in every financial market equilibrium the Security Market Line Theorem holds....

The effects of endogenous undiversifiable investment and market structure changes on security pricing are analyzed within the GEI-CAPM (General Equilibrium with Incomplete Markets Capital Asset Pricing Model). Both the mutual fund and security market line theorems are extended conditional to a...

A recent literature shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility, that is, it assumes an inverse relationship between first and second moments of asset returns. This paper suggests a reason...