Because of external financing costs, private business owners often need to self-finance new investment projects. These self-financing needs create an incentive for business owners to hold financial assets whose payoffs are positively correlated with self-financing needs. If this effect is aggregated, expected returns on financial assets should be negatively correlated with aggregate private inv...

Mehra and Prescott (1985) found the difference between average equity and debt returns puzzling because it was too large to be a premium for bearing nondiversifiable aggregate risk. Here, we re-examine this puzzle, taking into account some factors ignored by Mehra and Prescott–taxes, regulatory constraints, and diversification costs–and focusing on long-term rather than short-term savings instr...

Participants in 401(k) retirement plans violate the basic principle of diversification by investing significant fractions of their savings in their employers’ equity. This paper characterizes investors’ active changes to their company stock investment over time by analyzing new inflows and transfers. The average investor seems to base active changes on salient information, paying attention to p...

This paper develops and implements a methodology for pricing multivariate contingent claims (MVCC's) based on semiparametric estimation of the multivariate risk-neutral density function. This methodology generates MVCC prices which are consistent with current market prices of univariate contingent claims. This method allows for completely general marginal risk-neutral densities and is compatibl...