G11 - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
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Financial Constraints and the Cash-Holding Behaviour of Canadian Firms
The proportion of assets held by the average Canadian firm in the form of cash has increased steadily since the early 1990s, and is now roughly twice as large as in 1990. The literature has established that the cash-holding behaviour of firms is highly correlated with financial constraints and firm characteristics. -
On Portfolio Separation Theorems with Heterogeneous Beliefs and Attitudes towards Risk
The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called twofund separation relies on special assumptions on either returns or preferences. -
The Carry Trade, Portfolio Diversification, and the Adjustment of the Japanese Yen
In this paper, the author considers whether fundamentals or other factors can explain the yen's ongoing weakness. In particular, the importance of capital outflows due to the carry trade and longer-term portfolio investment outflows, which may be delaying the adjustment of the yen, are investigated. A simple portfolio model is developed, composed of a speculative […] -
Implications of Asymmetry Risk for Portfolio Analysis and Asset Pricing
Asymmetric shocks are common in markets; securities' payoffs are not normally distributed and exhibit skewness. This paper studies the portfolio holdings of heterogeneous agents with preferences over mean, variance and skewness, and derives equilibrium prices. -
Uninsured Idiosyncratic Production Risk with Borrowing Constraints
The author analyzes a general-equilibrium model of a heterogeneous agents economy in which the agents are subject to borrowing constraints and uninsurable idiosyncratic production risk. -
The Stochastic Discount Factor: Extending the Volatility Bound and a New Approach to Portfolio Selection with Higher-Order Moments
The authors extend the well-known Hansen and Jagannathan (HJ) volatility bound. HJ characterize the lower bound on the volatility of any admissible stochastic discount factor (SDF) that prices correctly a set of primitive asset returns. -
Commodity-Linked Bonds: A Potential Means for Less-Developed Countries to Raise Foreign Capital
The author suggests that commodity-linked bonds could provide a potential means for less-developed countries (LDCs) to raise money on the international capital markets, rather than through standard forms of financing. -
The Demand for Money in a Stochastic Environment
The author re-examines the demand-for-money theory in an intertemporal optimization model. The demand for real money balances is derived to be a function of real income and the rates of return of all financial assets traded in the economy. -
Collateral and Credit Supply
The author examines the role of collateral in an environment where lenders and borrowers possess identical information and similar beliefs about its future value. Using option-pricing techniques, he shows that a secured loan contract is equivalent to a regular bond and an embedded option to the borrower to default.