Financial innovation in recent decades has expanded portfolio choice. We investigate how greater choice affects investors’ savings and asset returns. establish a channel by which increases savings—by enabling them to earn the aggregate risk premium or take speculative positions. In equilibrium, customization (access risky assets beyond market portfolio) reduces risk-free rate. Participation but...

Incentive problems make securities’ payoffs imperfectly pledgeable, limiting agents’ ability to issue liabilities. We analyze the equilibrium consequences of such endogenous incompleteness in a dynamic exchange economy. Because markets are endogenously incomplete, agents have different intertemporal marginal rates substitution, so that they value assets differently. Consequently, hold portfolio...

We propose a tractable model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are not contractible they incur private costs running them. Incentive contracts for fund managers create pecuniary externality through their effect on prices. Benchmarking inflates prices creates crowded trades. The crowding reduces the effe...

Assuming elliptically contoured distribution for portfolio asset returns, we derive the exact marginal and joint densities of the global minimum variance portfolio variance, and weights estimators. We also construct a test for the hypothesis that the global minimum variance is less then or equal to a certain value. A stochastic representation and moments of its estimator is provided. We illustr...

We examine the impact of retirement exibility and the constraint against borrowing from future labor income on optimal consumption, optimal investment, and optimal retirement policy. We solve three alternative models almost explicitly in parametric forms (up to at most a constant) and provide veri cation theorems for the claimed solutions. In addition, we also obtain analytical comparative stat...

This paper describes a pure-exchange, continuous-time economy with two heterogeneous agents and complete markets. A novel feature of the economy is that agents perceive some security returns as ambiguous in the sense often attributed to Frank Knight. The equilibrium is described completely in closed-form. After identifying agents as countries, the model is applied to address the consumption hom...

The negative relationship between market P/E ratios and government bond yields seems to have become conventional wisdom among practitioners. Both (limited) empirical evidence and a (misleading) suggestion that the model originated in the Fed are used to support the model’s plausibility. The evidence in this note, from 20 international markets, seriously questions the wide acceptance and use of ...