The market portfolio is in one sense the least important portfolio to provide to investors. In an J-agent one-period stochastic endowment economy, where preferences are quadratic, a social-welfare-minded contract designer would never create a contract that would allow trading the market...

Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Labor income indices are created for groupings of individuals, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. People are grouped by a clustering algorithm based on an estimated transition matrix between jobs, by education level, and by skill category. The groupings are defined so that...

We provide methods of decomposing the variance of world national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities, and, therefore, the most important missing international risk markets to establish. One method uses a total variance reduction...

Evidence is shown, using US foreclosure data by state 1975-93, that periods of high default rates on home mortgages strongly tend to follow real estate price declines or interruptions in real estate price increase. The relation between price decline and foreclosure rates is modelled using a...

Home equity insurance policies, policies insuring homeowners against declines in the price of their homes, would bear some resemblance both to ordinary insurance and to financial hedging vehicles. A menu of choices for the design of such policies is presented here, and conceptual issues are...

Efficient markets models assert that the price of each asset is equal to the optimal forecast of its ex-post (or fundamental) value, but the models do not imply that the covariances between prices equal the corresponding covariances of ex-post values. We present bounds for covariances and...

There have been enormous differences of opinion between U.S. and Japanese institutional investors about the outlook for stock prices, differences across the two countries in average one-year-ahead forecasts for the Japanese stock market as great as twenty percentage points. In the past two years...

Real stock prices seem to overreact to changes in long-term interest rates. That is, real stock prices drop when long-term interest rates rise (and rise when they fall) more than would be implied by a rational expectations present value model where expectations are based on a vector...

Random samples of the Moscow' and New York populations were compared in their attitudes towards free markets by administering identical telephone interviews in the two countries in May, 1990. Although the Soviet respondents were somewhat less likely to accept exchange of money as a solution to...