Dynamic Portfolio Choice and Consumption Plan under Inflation with Nominal and Indexed Bonds

Dynamic Portfolio Choice and Consumption Plan under Inflation with Nominal and Indexed Bonds
Author: Mao-Wei Hung
Publisher:
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

We solve for an intertemporal portfolio-consumption choice problem under inflation. We assume that the nominal interest rate is observable while the expected inflation rate is not. The inclusion of the indexed bond in the investor's portfolio provides the investor an opportunity to perfectly hedge against the inflation risk. While the hedging demand of the nominal bonds would be crowded out proportional to the demand of the indexed bonds. The estimation risk of the estimated inflation rate would also introduce an additional hedging demand. We also show that the direction in which the interest rate and the inflation rate affect the optimal consumption-wealth ratio would rely on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution of the investor. When the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is smaller than one, the consumption-wealth ratio is increasing in the nominal interest rate and decreasing in the inflation rate; the income effect dominates. When the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is greater than one, the consumption-wealth ratio is affected in an opposite way; the substitution effect dominates. However, the consumption-wealth ratio is not decided by the real interest rate, i.e., the difference of the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate. It also depends on the absolute levels of the nominal interest rate and the inflation rate. The nominal and real consumption growth rates are derived. The nominal consumption growth is decided by the sum of the real consumption growth rate and inflation rate.

Strategic Asset Allocation

Strategic Asset Allocation
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2002-01-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019160691X

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors—-both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities—-seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities—-both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks—-vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors.

Pension Fund Risk Management

Pension Fund Risk Management
Author: Marco Micocci
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 766
Release: 2010-01-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1439817545

As pension fund systems decrease and dependency ratios increase, risk management is becoming more complex in public and private pension plans. Pension Fund Risk Management: Financial and Actuarial Modeling sheds new light on the current state of pension fund risk management and provides new technical tools for addressing pension risk from an integr

Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations
Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2009-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1135179778

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Evaluating the Financial Performance of Pension Funds

Evaluating the Financial Performance of Pension Funds
Author: Richard Hinz
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2010-01-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0821381601

Countries around the world are increasingly relying on individual pension savings accounts to provide income in old age for their citizens. Although these funds have now been in place for several decades, their performance is usually measured using methods that are not meaningful in relation to this long-term objective. The recent global financial crisis has highlighted the need to develop better performance evaluation methods that are consistent with the retirement income objective of pension funds. Compiling research derived from a partnership among the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and three private partners, 'Evaluating the Financial Performance of Pension Funds' discusses the theoretical basis and key implementation issues related to the design of performance benchmarks based on life-cycle savings and investment principles. The book begins with an evaluation of the financial performance of funded pension systems using the standard mean variance framework. It then provides a discussion of the limitations inherent to applying these methods to pension funds and outlines the many other issues that should be addressed in developing more useful and meaningful performance measures through the formulation of pension-specific benchmark portfolios. Practical implementation issues are addressed through empirical examples of how such benchmarks could be developed. The book concludes with commentary and observations from several noted pension experts about the need for a new approach to performance measurement and the impact of the recent global financial crisis on pension funds.

Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making

Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making
Author: Leonard C. MacLean
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 941
Release: 2013
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9814417351

This handbook in two parts covers key topics of the theory of financial decision making. Some of the papers discuss real applications or case studies as well. There are a number of new papers that have never been published before especially in Part II.Part I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Part II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management Using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. The handbook plus the book of problems form a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as supplementary text in finance theory, financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vickson in 1975 (updated 2 nd edition published in 2006).

Overcoming the Saving Slump

Overcoming the Saving Slump
Author: Annamaria Lusardi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2009-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226497100

The great majority of working Americans are unprepared to face the difficult task of planning for retirement. In fact, the personal savings rate has been holding steady at zero for several years, down from 8 percent in the mid-1980s. Overcoming the Saving Slump explores the many challenges facing workers in the transition from a traditional defined benefit pension system to one that requires more individual responsibility, analyzing the considerable impediments to saving and evaluating financial literacy programs devised by employers and the government. Mapping the changing landscape of pensions and the rise of defined contribution plans, Annamaria Lusardi and others investigate new methods for stimulating saving and promoting financial education drawing on the experience of the United States as well as countries that have privatized their welfare systems, including Sweden and Chile. This timely volume pinpoints where human resources departments, the financial industry, and government officials have succeeded—or failed—in bridging the way to a new retirement system. As the workforce ages and more pensions disappear each second, Lusardi’s findings will be invaluable for economists and anyone facing retirement.

Handbook of Financial Econometrics

Handbook of Financial Econometrics
Author: Yacine Ait-Sahalia
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 809
Release: 2009-10-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0080929842

This collection of original articles—8 years in the making—shines a bright light on recent advances in financial econometrics. From a survey of mathematical and statistical tools for understanding nonlinear Markov processes to an exploration of the time-series evolution of the risk-return tradeoff for stock market investment, noted scholars Yacine Aït-Sahalia and Lars Peter Hansen benchmark the current state of knowledge while contributors build a framework for its growth. Whether in the presence of statistical uncertainty or the proven advantages and limitations of value at risk models, readers will discover that they can set few constraints on the value of this long-awaited volume. - Presents a broad survey of current research—from local characterizations of the Markov process dynamics to financial market trading activity - Contributors include Nobel Laureate Robert Engle and leading econometricians - Offers a clarity of method and explanation unavailable in other financial econometrics collections