The author investigates, in a two-country general equilibrium model, whether a bias in consumption towards domestic goods will necessarily lead to a preference for domestic securities. We develop a model where investors are constrained to consume only from their domestic capital stock and where it is costly to transfer capital across countries. In this model, investors less risk averse than an investor with log utility bias their portfolios towards domestic assets. Investors more risk averse than log, however, prefer foreign assets. Thus, this model suggests that it is unlikely that the portfolios observed empirically can be explained by the high proportion of domestic goods in total consumption.

In this article we examine the effect of the imperfect mobility of goods on international risk sharing and, through that, on the investment in risky projects, welfare, and growth. Our main result is that the welfare gain from integration of financial markets is not greatly reduced by the presence of goods market imperfections, modeled as a cost of transferring goods from one country to the other. We also find that the gain is nonmonotonic with respect to investors' risk aversion and the aggregate volatility of output growth. The policy implication to be drawn is that financial market integration is a worthwhile goal to pursue even when full goods mobility has not been achieved

The authors examine the effect of segmented commodity markets on the relation between forward future spot exchange rates in a dynamic economy. They calculate the slope coefficient in their theoretical economy from regressing exchange rate changes on forward premia. With reasonable parameter values, the slope coefficient is less than unity. However, even for extreme parameters the slope is not less than zero, as found in the data. A negative slope coefficient in a nominal version of the model requires the covariance between monetary shocks and relative output shocks to be significantly negative, in contrast to the covariance in the data.

In this paper, we study asset prices in a dynamic, continuous-time, and general-equilibrium endowment economy in which agents have "catching up with the Joneses" utility functions and differ with respect to their beliefs (because of differences in priors) and their preference parameters for time discount, risk aversion, and sensitivity to habit. A key contribution of our paper is to demonstrate how one can obtain a closed-form solution to the consumption-sharing rule for agents who have both heterogeneous priors and heterogeneous preferences without restricting the risk aversion of the two agents to special values. We solve in closed form also for the state-price density, the risk-free interest rate and market price of risk, the stock price, equity risk premium, and volatility of stock returns, the term structure of interest rates, and the conditions necessary to obtain a stationary equilibrium in which both agents survive in the long run. The methodology we develop is sufficiently general in that, as long as markets are complete, it can be used to obtain the sharing rule and state prices for models set in discrete or continuous time and for arbitrary endowment and belief updating processes.

[We study the effect of introducing a nonredundant derivative on the volatilities of the stock market return and the locally risk-free interest rate. Our analysis uses a standard, frictionless, full-information, dynamic, continuous-time, general-equilibrium, Lucas endowment economy in which there are two classes of agents who have time-additive power utility functions and differ only in their risk aversion. Our main result is to show analytically that if the intensity of the precautionary demand for savings is not too high, then the introduction of a nonredundant derivative increases the volatility of stock market returns. Furthermore, in the economy with the derivative, the volatility of stock market returns can be substantially greater than that of aggregate dividend growth (fundamental volatility). We also show that the volatility of the locally risk-free interest rate increases with the introduction of the derivative.]

[We evaluate the out-of-sample performance of the sample-based mean-variance model, and its extensions designed to reduce estimation error, relative to the naive 1/N portfolio. Of the 14 models we evaluate across seven empirical datasets, none is consistently better than the 1/N rule in terms of Sharpe ratio, certainty-equivalent return, or turnover, which indicates that, out of sample, the gain from optimal diversification is more than offset by estimation error. Based on parameters calibrated to the US equity market, our analytical results and simulations show that the estimation window needed for the sample-based mean-variance strategy and its extensions to outperform the 1/N benchmark is around 3000 months for a portfolio with 25 assets and about 6000 months for a portfolio with 50 assets. This suggests that there are still many "miles to go" before the gains promised by optimal portfolio choice can actually be realized out of sample.]

[We develop a model for an investor with multiple priors and aversion to ambiguity. We characterize the multiple priors by a "confidence interval" around the estimated expected returns and we model ambiguity aversion via a minimization over the priors. Our model has several attractive features: (1) it has a solid axiomatic foundation; (2) it is flexible enough to allow for different degrees of uncertainty about expected returns for various subsets of assets and also about the return-generating model; and (3) it delivers closed-form expressions for the optimal portfolio. Our empirical analysis suggests that, compared with portfolios from classical and Bayesian models, ambiguity-averse portfolios are more stable over time and deliver a higher out-of sample Sharpe ratio.]

We study whether investors can exploit serial dependence in stock returns to improve out-of-sample portfolio performance. We show that a vector-autoregressive (VAR) model captures stock return serial dependence in a statistically significant manner. Analytically, we demonstrate that, unlike contrarian and momentum portfolios, an arbitrage portfolio based on the VAR model attains positive expected returns regardless of the sign of asset return cross-covariances and autocovariances. Empirically, we show, however, that both the arbitrage and mean-variance portfolios based on the VAR model outperform the traditional unconditional portfolios only for transaction costs below ten basis points.

We investigate, in a two‐country general equilibrium model, whether a bias in consumption towards domestic goods will necessarily lead to a preference for domestic securities. We develop a model where investors are constrained to consume only from their domestic capital stock and where it is costly to transfer capital across countries. In this model, investors less risk averse than an investor with log utility bias their portfolios towards domestic assets. Investors more risk averse than log, however, prefer foreign assets. Thus, this model suggests that it is unlikely that the portfolios observed empirically can be explained by the high proportion of domestic goods in total consumption.

We investigate, in a two-country general equilibrium model, whether a bias in consumption towards domestic goods will necessarily lead to a preference for domestic securities. We develop a model where investors are constrained to consume only from their domestic capital stock and where it is costly to transfer capital across countries. In this model, investors less risk averse than an investor with log utility bias their portfolios towards domestic assets. Investors more risk averse than log, however, prefer foreign assets. Thus, this model suggests that it is unlikely that the portfolios observed empirically can be explained by the high proportion of domestic goods in total consumption.