The ratio of outstanding debt to gross national product in the United States has shown essentially no time trend over a period measured not in years but in decades. The research reported in this paper indicates that lenders' portfolio behavior exhibits characteristics that could provide...

This paper develops behavioral relationships explaining investors' demands for long-term bonds, using three alternative hypotheses about investors' expectations of future bond prices (yields). The results, based on U.S. 'data for six major categories of bond market investors, consistently...

Among the numerous familiar sets of specific assumptions sufficient to derive mean-variance portfolio behavior from more general expected utility maximization in continuous time, the assumptions of constant relative risk aversion and joint normally distributed asset return assessments are also...