In this paper, we analyze the impact of default risk on the portfolio decision of an investor wishing to invest in corporate bonds. Default risk is modeled via a reduced form approach and we allow for random recovery as well as joint default events. Depending on the structure of the model, we...

This paper provides a unifying framework for the modeling of various types of credit risks such as contagion effects. We argue that Markov chains can efficiently be used to tackle these problems. However, our approach is not limited to pricing problems with contagion. Other applications include...

We provide explicit solutions to life-cycle utility maximization problems involving dynamic decisions on investments in stocks and bonds, consumption of perishable goods, and the rental and the ownership of residential real estate. House prices, stock prices, interest rates, and the labor income...

The utility-maximizing consumption and investment strategy of an individual investor receiving an unspanned labor income stream seems impossible to find in closed form and very difficult to find using numerical solution techniques. We suggest an easy procedure for finding a specific, simple, and...

Utility-maximizing consumption and investment strategies in closed form are unknown for realistic settings involving portfolio constraints, incomplete markets, and potentially a high number of state variables. Standard numerical methods are hard to implement in such cases. We propose a numerical...

We compare the durations of corporate and Treasury bonds in the reduced-form, intensity based credit risk modeling framework. In the case where default risk is independent of default-free interest rates, we provide in each of the three most popular recovery regimes a sufficient condition under...

The observed hump-shaped life-cycle pattern in individuals' consumption cannot be explained by the classical consumption-savings model. We explicitly solve a model with utility of both consumption and leisure and with educational decisions affecting future wages. We show optimal consumption is...

In this paper a portfolio problem is considered where trading in the risky asset is stopped if some state process hits a predefined barrier. This state process need not to be perfectly correlated with the risky asset. We give a representation result for the value function and provide a...

This paper relates recursive utility in continuous time to its discrete-time origins and provides a rigorous and intuitive alternative to a heuristic approach presented in [Duffie, Epstein 1992], who formally define recursive utility in continuous time via backward stochastic differential...