We develop a two sector general equilibrium model with capital accumulation and convex adjustment costs. We use the model to study capital asset pricing and reallocation, as well as optimal consumption and investment decisions. With two sectors, the consumer balances diversification against the potential productivity and efficiency gains of investing more heavily in one sector. The general fram...

Finance theory can be used to form informative prior beliefs in financial decision making. This paper approaches portfolio selection in a Bayesian framework that incorporates a prior degree of belief in an asset pricing model. Sample evidence on home bias and value and size effects is evaluated from an asset-allocation perspective. U.S. investors' belief in the domestic CAPM must be very strong...

We propose an errors-in-variables factor model which extends the classical capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to the case where the market returns contain additive noise. Using the model, we propose a method for choosing portfolios of assets, such as U.S. stocks in the S&P 100 and virtual electricity contracts in a regional transmission organization. Virtual electricity contracts relate real-ti...

When I studied microeconomics forty years ago, I was first taught how optimizing firms and consumers would behave, and then taught the nature of the economic equilibrium which would result from such behavior. Let me refer to this as part one and part two of my microeconomics course. My work on portfolio theory considers how an optimizing investor would behave, whereas the work by Sharpe and Lin...

It is a common practice to use t-ratios to select models in empirical asset pricing. In this paper, we show that such a practice could lead to the acceptance of very poor models. As an illustration, we examine a simple version of the widely used cross-sectional regression methodology and find analytically that variables with the highest t-ratios may not be highly correlated with expected return...

During recession, many macroeconomic variables display higher levels of volatility. We show how introducing an AR(1)-ARCH(1) driving process into the canonical Lucas consumption CAPM framework can account for the empirically observed greater volatilty of asset returns during recessions. In particular, agents' joint forecasting of levels and time-varying second moments transforms symmetric-volat...

As emphasized by Giovannini and Labadie (1991), empirical regularities involving nominal interest rates, asset prices, and inflation should be ultimately determined by money. The role of money, however, is almost neglected, particularly in terms of asset-pricing literature. This paper attempts to investigate the role of money in asset pricing in Japan. Specifically, it compares the empirical pe...

This paper examines the determinants of R&D cooperation focusing on the relationship between firms R&D cooperation and knowledge spillovers on a sample of Italian innovative firms drawn from the Italian Fourth Community Innovation Survey. I explore this relationships taking into account different types of R&D cooperations and the endogeneity problems which arise from the likely mutual dependenc...

This paper compares the pricing and hedging performance of the LMM model against two spot-rate models, namely Hull-White and Black-Karasinski, and the more recent Swap Market Model from an Asset-Liability-Management (ALM) perspective. In contrast to previous studies in the literature, our emphasis here is on ALM and we use hedging performance on Bermudan swaptions to proxy risk management outco...

Many tests of asset-pricing models address only the pricing predictions, but these pricing predictions rest on portfolio choice predictions that seem obviously wrong. This paper suggests a new approach to asset pricing and portfolio choices based on unobserved heterogeneity. This approach yields the standard pricing conclusions of classical models but is consistent with very different portfolio...