The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called...

This paper characterizes the equilibrium demand and risk premiums in the presence of skewness risk. We extend the classical mean-variance two-fund separation theorem to a three-fund separation theorem. The additional fund is the skewness portfolio, i.e. a portfolio that gives the optimal hedge...

Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities' payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. A three funds separation theorem...

The authors extend the well-known Hansen and Jagannathan (HJ) volatility bound. HJ characterize the lower bound on the volatility of any admissible stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices correctly a set of primitive asset returns. The authors characterize this lower bound for any...

The authors examine the ability of economic models with regime shifts to rationalize and explain the risk-aversion and pricing-kernel puzzles put forward in Jackwerth (2000). They build an economy where investors' preferences or economic fundamentals are state-dependent, and simulate prices for...

Risk aversion functions extracted from observed stock and option prices can be negative, as shown by Aït-Sahalia and Lo (2000), Journal of Econometrics 94: 9--51; and Jackwerth (2000), The Review of Financial Studies 13(2), 433--51. We rationalize this puzzle by a lack of conditioning on latent...

This paper prepared for the Handbook of Statistics (Vol.14: "Statistical Methods in Finance"), surveys the subject of stochastic volatility. the following subjects are covered: volatility in financial markets (instantaneous volatility of asset returns, implied volatilities in option prices and...

In this paper, we survey some of the recent nonparapmetric estimation methods which were developed to price derivative contracts. We focus on equity options and staart with a so-called model-free approach which involves very little financial theory. Next we discuss nonparametric and...

This paper prepared for the Handbook of Statistics (Vol.14: "Statistical Methods in Finance"), surveys the subject of stochastic volatility. The following subjects are covered: volatility in financial markets (instantaneous volatility of asset returns, implied volatilities in option prices and...