Returns on international equities are characterized by jumps; moreover, these jumps tend to occur at the same time across countries leading to systemic risk .In this Paper, we evaluate whether systemic risk reduces substantially the gains from international diversification. First, in order to...

Returns on international equities are characterized by jumps; moreover, these jumps tend to occur at the same time across countries leading to systemic risk. In this paper, we evaluate whether systemic risk reduces substantially the gains from international diversification. First, in order to...

In this paper, we study the effect of proportional transaction costs on consumption-portfolio decisions and asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium economy with a financial market that has a single-period bond and two risky stocks, one of which incurs the transaction cost. Our model has...

Our objective in this paper is to examine whether one can use option-implied information to improve the selection of mean-variance portfolios with a large number of stocks, and to document which aspects of option-implied information are most useful for improving their out-of-sample performance....

Alternative assets, such as private equity, hedge funds, and real assets, are illiquid and opaque, and thus pose a challenge to traditional models of asset allocation. In this paper, we study asset allocation and asset pricing in a general-equilibrium model with liquid assets and an alternative...

Our objective is to investigate the effect of model misspecification on mean-variance portfolios and to show how asset-pricing theory and asymptotic analysis (for large number of assets) can be used to provide powerful solutions to mitigate misspecification. The starting point of our analysis is...

We compare the performance of equal-, value-, and price-weighted portfolios of stocks in the major U.S. equity indices over the last four decades. We find that the equal-weighted portfolio with monthly rebalancing outperforms the value- and price-weighted portfolios in terms of total mean...

We develop a dynamic general-equilibrium framework with multiple households and multiple risky assets to explain how less- and more-sophisticated households differ in their portfolio and wealth dynamics. Differences in sophistication are modeled via heterogeneous confidence about asset returns,...

Households with familiarity biases tilt their portfolios toward a few risky assets. The resulting mean-variance loss from portfolio underdiversification is equivalent to only a modest reduction of about 1 percent per year in a household's portfolio return. However, once we consider also the...

We develop a normative theory for constructing mean-variance portfolios robust to model misspecification. We identify two inefficient portfolios---an "alpha'' portfolio, representing latent asset demand, that depends only on pricing errors and a "beta'' portfolio that depends on factor risk...