In this paper, we solve the intertemporal investment problem of an investor holding a portfolio of default-free and defaultable bonds. Default-risk is modeled in an intensity based framework with state variables following an a¢ne di¤usion. The structure of the optimal portfolio over time is investigated and compared to the static meanvariance portfolio. Furthermore, we describe the impact of ti...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch population, that circumvents the issue of defining the social circle, we consider collateralized, consum...

We examine how insiders and firms trade when arbitrage is limited. When arbitrage is costly (proxied by high idiosyncratic risk), insiders and firms earn higher absolute returns on their trades (insider trading, share repurchases, and seasoned equity offerings) in the following year. Furthermore, they initiate their trades following greater past price movements in the preceding year. These resu...

The consensus wisdom of active mutual fund managers, as reflected in their average overand underweighting decisions, contains valuable information about future stock returns. Analyzing a comprehensive sample of active U.S. equity funds 1984—2008, we find that stocks heavily overweighted by active funds outperform their underweighted counterparts by more than 7% per year, after adjustments for t...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

The finance literature documents the relation between labor income and the crosssection of stock returns. A possible explanation is the hedging of investors with relative wealth concerns who pay a premium for securities that help them to keep up with their peers. Relative wealth concerns imply a local effect and a negative risk premium associated with the risk factor, since investors are willin...

This paper presents a potential solution to the home bias puzzle based on a new open economy macroeconomics model. In response to technology shocks, sticky prices generate a negative correlation between labor income and the profits of domestic firms, leading to home bias in equity holdings. In contrast, under flexible prices, labor income and the profits of the domestic firms are positively cor...

An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset’s historical price chart, and received both an accuracy bonus for predicting the price at some future point, and an unconditional award that was either increasing or decreasing in this price. Despite incentives for hedging...

I show that investment in housing plays a crucial role in explaining the patterns of cross sectional variation in the composition of wealth and the level of stockholdings observed in portfolio composition data. Due to investment in housing, younger and poorer investors have limited ̄nancial wealth to invest in stocks, which reduces the bene ̄ts of equity market participation. House price risk cr...

In an exchange economy under uncertainty with two periods, one physical good, and finitely many states of the world, we show that for every (complete or incomplete) market span there exists a sequence of securities such that if they are introduced into markets one by one, the prices of any security is not affected by the subsequent introduction of newer securities and they together generate the...