This paper examines the implications of segmented assets markets for the real and nominal effects of monetary policy. I develop a model, in which varieties of consumption bundles are purchased sequentially. Newly injected money thus disseminates slowly through the economy via second-round...

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...

We provide explicit solutions to life-cycle utility maximization problems simultaneously 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...

SIPP data are used to analyze the wealth of the U.S. foreign-born population. We find that the median wealth level of U.S.-born couples is 2.3 times the median of foreign-born couples, while the median wealth level of U.S.-born singles is three times that of foreign-born singles. Further, there...

Many policy makers and economists argue that financial literacy is key to financial well-being. But why do many individuals remain financially illiterate despite the apparent importance of being financially informed? This paper presents results of a field study linking individual decisions to...

This paper examines a continuous-time intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem for an ambiguity-averse investor with multiple priors when the expected return of a risky asset is unobservable and follows a hidden Markov chain. The investor's beliefs over investment opportunities are...

This study explores the information content of HML and SMB by linking the Fama-French factors to shocks in the state variables which predict future investment opportunities. It shows that the HML factor contains information about shocks to default spread. Moreover, the Fama-French model explains...

In poor societies, asset accumulation serves as insurance. It also opens the door to wider inequality. Many societies prohibit certain types of accumulation, such as land sales or indenture contracts. This paper investigates the theoretical relationship between risk sharing, asset accumulation,...

In this paper, we show that in a model where investors have heterogeneous preferences, the expected return of risky assets depends on the idiosyncratic coskewness beta, which measures the co-movement of the individual stock variance and the market return. We find that there is a negative...

We introduce the Homoscedastic Gamma [HG] model where the distribution of returns is characterized by its mean, variance and an independent skewness parameter under both measures. The model predicts that the spread between historical and risk-neutral volatilities is a function of the risk...