As their populations grow older, the industrial countries face steep increases in public pension costs. If countries change their pension systems in advance of sharply higher pension costs, it is possible to prepare for the added retirement costs by funding a portion of the future liabilities...

Most disputes between customers and their brokerage firms are resolved through arbitration as a result of the Supreme Court's holding in Shearson/American Express, Inc. v. McMahon. McMahon was part of two larger trends of the Supreme Court: the Court's general pro-arbitration trend and its...

In this paper I examine the relation between profits from book-to-market strategies and momentum strategies. Specifically, I test two time-series hypotheses which are not mutually exclusive, but do have opposite predictions for subsequent momentum profits. First, if periods of large...

The aim of this article is to describe how portfolio insurance works, the main strategies employed and how these have evolved over recent years, and the possible links between their use and financial market stability. The key benefit of portfolio insurance is that it enables financial risk to be...

The typical older household in the United States now arrives at retirement with an array of financial resources. These resources usually include home equity, vehicles, and bank accounts and may also include financial assets such as Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and stocks or other...

This paper considers the prospects for adding choice of portfolio composition to a life cycle model of retirement and saving, while preserving the ability of the model to continue to explain the course of saving and retirement. If eventually successful, such a modification might be used to...

Studying household investment behavior is essential for understanding the full consequences of old age social security benefits. Using data from six waves of the Health and Retirement Study, we analyze the dynamics of portfolio composition before respondents start claiming social security...

Using the Mercer database of Canadian institutional money managers we test for performance persistence in several different large-cap equity mandates. From 1990 to 2008 we find that top-performing funds over the prior four years have no better chance of staying in the top half than of falling...

We develop a model of portfolio selection with subjective uncertainty and learning in order to explain why some people hold stocks while others don't. We model heterogeneity in information directly, which is an alternative to the existing explanations that emphasized heterogeneity in transaction...

Conventional wisdom suggests that optimism should be positively associated with risk taking. However, this has hardly been directly tested in the laboratory. In this paper, we report an experiment regarding risk perception and risk taking. Our data supports the hypothesis that two sufficient...