We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that...

Several attempts have been made to reduce the impact of estimation errors on the optimal portfolio composition. On the one hand, improved estimators of the necessary moments have been developed and on the other hand, heuristic methods have been generated to enhance the portfolio performance, for...

The most relevant practical impediment to an application of the Markowitz portfolio selection approach is the problem of estimating return moments, in particular return expectations. We analyze the consequences of using return estimates implied by analysts' dividend forecasts under the explicit...

In a two-country portfolio model with leverage constraints, I focus on private assets in order to understand how their behaviour can justify an expected excess return as well as the flight-to-safety observed in the data. The specific goal is to study how much these phenomena are explained by the...

This paper uses a novel numerical optimization technique – robust optimization – that is well suited to solving the asset-liability management (ALM) problem for pension schemes. It requires the estimation of fewer stochastic parameters, reduces estimation risk and adopts a prudent approach...

This paper points out the importance of Stochastic Dominance (SD) efficient sets being convex. We reviewclassic convexity and efficient set characterization results on SD efficiency of a given portfolio relative to adiversified set of assets and generalize them in the following aspects. First,...

For more than three decades, empirical analysis of stochastic dominance was restricted to settings with mutually exclusive choice alternatives. In recent years, a number of methods for testing efficiency of diversified portfolios have emerged, which can be classified into three main categories:...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...