This paper investigates the financial risk-taking behavior of pension funds since 2000. I assemble a new database containing portfolio holdings of more than 100 pension funds from 14 advanced economies. The study reveals three key findings. First, I show that pension fund portfolios have become...

This paper examines the analytical underpinnings of the standard micro portfolio approach to public debt management (PDM) that aims at minimising longer-term cash-flow based borrowing costs at an acceptable level of risk. The study concludes that two technical key assumptions need to hold for...

We explore the effects of fat tails on the equilibrium implications of the long run risks model of asset pricing by introducing innovations with dampened power law to consumption and dividends growth processes. We estimate the structural parameters of the proposed model by maximum likelihood. We...

We present efficient partial differential equation (PDE) methods for continuous time mean-variance portfolio allocation problems when the underlying risky asset follows a jump-diffusion. The standard formulation of mean-variance optimal portfolio allocation problems, where the total wealth is...

We analyze optimal monetary policy and its implications for asset prices, when aggregate demand has inertia and responds to asset prices with a lag. If there is a negative output gap, the central bank optimally overshoots aggregate asset prices (asset prices are initially pushed above their...

This paper presents an equilibrium model in a pure exchange economy when investors have three possible sources of heterogeneity. Investors may differ in their beliefs, in their level of risk aversion and in their time preference rate. We study the impact of investors heterogeneity on the...

This paper studies long-run trends in the expected return on risky assets and its relationship with the safe rate. We use time-varying return predictability regressions to estimate expected returns on two major risky asset classes – equity and housing – across 17 countries and 145 years. We...

In this paper, we build up a portfolio in the Chinese residential real estate market. We separate 35 big cities in China into 3 groups with different criteria. Then we build portfolios for these groups, by comparing the efficient frontier and Sharpe ratio with the portfolio of full samples. We...

Investors with heterogeneous trading horizons require compensation for the exposure to different risks. The no-arbitrage valuation over increasing horizons is described by the evolution of stochastic discount factors (SDFs). Each of them exhibits a multiplicative decomposition into deterministic...

A numerical technique based on the embedding technique proposed in [21, 33] for dynamic mean-variance (MV) optimization problems may yield spurious points, i.e. points which are not on the efficient frontier. In [27], it is shown that spurious points can be eliminated by examining the left upper...