This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive international dataset, we find that interest-rate related variables are usually among the most prominent predict...

I develop an analytical general-equilibrium model to explain economic sources of businesscycle pattern of aggregate stock market returns. With concave production functions and capital accumulation, a technology shock has a pro-cyclical direct effect and a counter-cyclical indirect effect on expected returns. The indirect effect, reflecting the “feedback” effect of consumers’ behavior on asset r...

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...

Real estate investments are typically characterized by high degrees of leverage and long loan tenures. In perfect capital markets, leverage has no impact on the investment decision apart from tax considerations. However, the mortgage financing market is imperfect in many countries. In the presence of market imperfections, an optimal holding period exists for real property investments. We provid...

I consider the saving and investment decisions of American and Italian consumers in a lifecycle model with temptation preferences. Comparing the choices with and without Social Security protection, I show that savings are postponed, less wealth is accumulated, and the portfolio share held in equities at retirement is larger with Social Security. Social Security distorts the decisions of agents ...

This paper uses a simple model of mean-variance capital markets equilibrium with proportional transactions costs to analyze the competition of stock markets for investors. We assume that equity trading is costly and endogenize transactions costs as variables strategically influenced by stock exchanges. Among other things, the model predicts that increasing financial market correlation leads to ...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the necessity to posit a specific utility function to describe investor's preferences and it does not impo...

We investigate the effectiveness of window-dressing as a potential strategy to be used by mutual fund managers to promote fund flows. Using a rank gap measure as a proxy for the likelihood that window-dressing has occurred, we find that fund investors as whole punish those managers who are suspected to have engaged in window-dressing. That is, we find a negative relation between the window-dres...

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 share price represents the company's value on market; buyers and sellers establish based quantity of demand supply shares. This research looks at how market capitalization, trading volume, BV, DER are used to analyze variations. aims understand investor behavior in fluctuating situations. method is multiple linear regression, data collection secondary data. study's results indicate a relati...