This paper evaluates the return on equity using novel data on the consumption of luxury goods. Specifying household utility as a nonhomothetic function of the consumption of both a luxury good and a basic good, we derive and evaluate the riskiness of equity in such a world. Household survey and...

We study asset allocation when the conditional moments of returns are partly predictable. Rather than first model the return distribution and subsequently characterize the portfolio choice, we determine directly the dependence of the optimal portfolio weights on the predictive variables. We...

Implicit in the prices of traded financial assets are Arrow- Debreu state prices or, in the continuous-state case, the state-price density (SPD). We construct an estimator for the SPD implicit in option prices and derive an asymptotic sampling theory for this estimator to gauge its accuracy. The...

We propose a model of dynamic trading where a strategic high frequency trader receives an imperfect signal about future order flows, and exploits his speed advantage to optimize his quoting policy. We determine the provision of liquidity, order cancellations, and impact on low frequency traders...

We develop and implement a technique for maximum likelihood estimation in closed-form of multivariate affine yield models of the term structure of interest rates. We derive closed-form approximations to the likelihood functions for all nine of the Dai and Singleton (2000) canonical affine models...

This paper shows that the asymptotic normal approximation is often insufficiently accurate for volatility estimators based on high frequency data. To remedy this, we compute Edgeworth expansions for such estimators. Unlike the usual expansions, we have found that in order to obtain meaningful...

The author proposes a nonparametric estimation procedure for continuous-time stochastic models. Because prices of derivative securities depend crucially on the form of the instantaneous volatility of the underlying process, he leaves the volatility function unrestricted and estimates it...

We analyze the impact of time series dependence in market microstructure noise on the properties of estimators of the integrated volatility of an asset price based on data sampled at frequencies high enough for that noise to be a dominant consideration. We show that combining two time scales for...