Approximately 1.2% of Colombia's GNP is spent every year on the war on drugs, but very little is known about coca farming decisions at the household level. In order to understand the decision to cultivate coca as well as that of the amount of land to use for its cultivation, we develop an...

Financial researchers agree that allocating money to employer stock in a 401(k) plan is a poor strategy, yet many employees do so. Not only does this investment strategy bear unrewarded idiosyncratic risk, but it also correlates employees' retirement portfolios with their human capital. I find...

We introduce a financial portfolio optimization framework that allows us to automatically select the relevant assets and estimate their weights by relying on a sorted L1-Norm penalization, henceforth SLOPE. Our approach is able to group constituents with similar correlation properties, and with...

Standard carry trades, which consist of purchasing high- and selling low-yield currencies, provide an economic diversification effect. However, the diversification effect is not robust, and is not borne out by much statistical evidence. We introduce optimized carry trades, which incorporate risk...