We estimate institutional investor preferences based on their proxy voting records in publicly listed Russell 3000 firms. We employ a spatial model of proxy voting, the W-NOMINATE method for scaling legislatures, and map institutional investors onto a left-right dimension based on their votes...

We find that money managers could reduce portfolio risk by incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria into their investment process. ESG-related issues can cause sudden regulatory changes and shifts in consumer tastes, resulting in large asset price swings which leave...

This paper analyzes optimal portfolio decisions of long-horizon investors with undiversifiable labor income risk and exogenous expected retirement and lifetime horizons. It shows that the fraction of savings optimally invested in stocks is unambiguously larger for employed investors than for...

We examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals in 296 401(k) plans over the 2005-2011 period. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to over 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts investing more internationally than older ones,...

We estimate risk aversion from the actual financial decisions of 2,168 investors in Lending Club (LC), a person-to-person lending platform. We develop a methodology that allows us to estimate risk aversion parameters from each portfolio choice. Since the same individual makes repeated...

We compare the trading performance of independent directors and other officers of the firm. We find that independent directors earn positive and substantial abnormal returns when they purchase their company stock, and that the difference with the same firm's officers is relatively small at most...

This note derives an approximate solution to a continuous-time intertemporal portfolio and consumption choice problem. The problem is the continuous-time equivalent of the discrete-time problem studied by Campbell and Viceira (1999), in which the expected excess return on a risky asset follows...

How do monetary policy rules, monetary policy uncertainty, and macroeconomic shocks affect the risk properties of US Treasury bonds? The exposure of US Treasury bonds to the stock market has moved considerably over time. While it was slightly positive on average over the period 1960-2011, it was...

This paper empirically analyzes the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) in inflation-indexed (or real) bonds and in nominal bonds in the US and in the UK. We strongly reject the EH in inflation-indexed bonds, and also confirm and update the existing evidence rejecting the EH in nominal bonds. This...

Estimating the liquidity differential between inflation-indexed and nominal bond yields, we separately test for time-varying real rate risk premia, inflation risk premia, and liquidity premia in U.S. and U.K. bond markets. We find strong, model independent evidence that real rate risk premia and...