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 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...

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 examines the pricing of options by approximating extensions of the Black-Scholes setup in which volatility follows a separate diffusion process. It gereralizes the well-known binomial model, constructing a discrete two-dimensional lattice. We discuss convergence issues extensively and...

This paper constructs a model for the evolution of a risky security that is consistent with a set of observed call option prices. It explicitly treats the fact that only a discrete data set can be observed in practice. The framework is general and allows for state dependent volatility and jumps....

This paper discusses the pitfalls in the pricing of barrier options a pproximations of the underlying continuous processes via discrete lattice models. These problems are studied first in a Black-Scholes model. Improvements result from a trinomial model and a further modified model where price...

This paper uses an asymptotically valid expansion to derive explicitly agent's individual demand schedules and then the equilibrium allocations in options. Agents derive financial and non-tradeable income over time; they can only partially offset the latter using bonds and stocks and the option...