We study optimal investment decisions for long-horizon investors with industry-specific labor income risks. We find that in addition to the volatility of labor income growth, the correlation between labor income and risky asset returns is another important factor that affects the optimal portfolio decisions and may provide a plausible explanation for the mixed empirical evidence of the relation...

Can consumption growth risk (or consumption beta) serve a better measure of risk than market beta? This paper answers this question by testing and comparing the performance of the traditional Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and consumption-based CAPM (CCAPM) across seven financial market sub-sectors in the emerging Taiwan stock market. The empirical performance of the CAPM is encouraging. Th...

The equity premium puzzle shows that using standard parameters and setup, the Consumption-based Capital Asset Pricing Model’s (CCAPM’s) prediction of the premium associated with systematic risk is out by an order of magnitude. The object of this paper is to consider the implications of each of the broad classes of explanations of the equity premium puzzle for resource allocation, welfare and po...

We demonstrate that in a CAPM economy Walras Law and the Tobin Separation Property characterize market demand on nite sets of prices. Consequently, for any number n there exist CAPM economies which have at least n equilibria and hence have n di erent beta pricing formulas. It is shown that the lower bound on the number of equilibria, n, is robust to pertubations of endowments.

Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We model this behavior as familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases. More importantly, equilibrium stock prices reflect an unfamiliarity premium. In an international setting, our model predicts t...

This paper derives a key monotonicity property common to all dividend signalling models: the greater the rate that dividend income is taxed relative to capital gains income, the greater the value of information revealed by a given dividend, and hence the greater the associated excess return. This monotonicity condition is tested with robust non-parametric techniques. No evidence is found to sup...

Asset prices and returns are known to vary signi®cantly more than output or aggregate consumption growth, and an order of magnitude in excess of what is justi®ed by innovations to fundamentals. We study excess price volatility in a lifecycle economy with two assets (claims on capital and a public debt bubble), heterogeneous agents, and increasing returns to ®nancial intermediation. We show that...

As the chase for great assets in biopharma gets tighter, the decision to proceed with a merger, acquisition or strategic transaction usually comes down to price. It’s also likely that both parties to the deal will rely on the standard discounted cash ow (DCF) methodology as the basic criteria to set the value of the asset, reinforced by estimates of future sales growth and market share. Yet whi...