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.

Essays on the Consumption and Investment Decisions of Households in the Presence of Housing and Human Capital

Essays on the Consumption and Investment Decisions of Households in the Presence of Housing and Human Capital
Author: Sebastien Betermier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2010
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays in which I study the consumption and investment decisions of households in the presence of two major asset classes: housing and human capital. In the first essay, I analyze how the dual consumption-investment nature of housing affects the consumption dynamics of households. A key feature of the housing market is that for most households, the consumption and investment benefits of housing are non-separable. I propose a tractable theoretical framework to understand the impact of this constraint on the consumption allocation of homeowners who would ideally like to own just a fraction of their home. For these homeowners, the relative cost of living in their home is not just the imputed rental cost. It also includes an opportunity cost of having an unbalanced financial portfolio. This cost varies substantially over time, and it is especially high in good times, when available investment opportunities yield high returns and homeowners allocate a high fraction of their wealth to current consumption. As a result, this cost dampens variations in the level of their housing consumption, and it amplifies variations in both their level of non-housing consumption and the composition of their consumption baskets. I then test empirically this theory in the second essay. Using household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I test the hypothesis that homeowners who face a high opportunity cost choose ceteris paribus a low housing consumption volatility. I also develop a method to identify these constrained homeowners by comparing their characteristics to those of a subset of unconstrained homeowners: the landlords. The results are consistent with the predictions of the model. First, the characteristics of homeowners that determine how constrained they are in the model are strong predictors of those homeowners who choose to be landlords in the data. For example, homeowners with a low level of risk aversion, little value for housing consumption, and a long horizon are relatively more likely to be landlords. Second, I find evidence that the more constrained homeowners adjust their level of housing consumption much less over time. In the third essay, which was developed in collaboration with Thomas Jansson, Christine Parlour, and Johan Walden, we investigate the relationship between workers' labor income and their investment decisions. Using a detailed Swedish data set on employment and portfolio holdings we estimate wage volatility and labor productivity for Swedish industries and, motivated by theory, we show that highly labor productive industries are more likely to pay workers variable wages. We also find that both levels and changes in wage volatility are significant in explaining changes in household investment portfolios. A household going from an industry with low wage volatility to one with high volatility will ceteris paribus decrease its portfolio share of risky assets by 25%, i.e., 7,750 USD. Similarly, a household that switches from a low labor productivity industry to one with high labor productivity decreases its risky asset share by 20%. Our results suggest that human capital risk is an important determinant of household portfolio holdings.

Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle

Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle
Author: James M. Poterba
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 1997
Genre: Age groups
ISBN:

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between age and portfolio structure for households in the US. We focus on both the probability that households of different ages own particular portfolio assets and the fraction of their net worth allocated to each asset category. We distinguish between age and cohort effects using data from the repeated cross-sections of the Federal Reserve Board's Surveys of Consumer Finances. We present two broad conclusions. First, there are important differences across asset classes in both the age-specific probabilities of asset ownership and in the portfolio shares of different assets at different ages. The notnion that all assets can be treated as identical from the standpoint of analyzing household wealth accumulation is not supported by the data. Institutional factors, asset liquidity, and evolving investor tastes must be recognized in modeling asset demand. These factors could affect analyses of overall household saving as well as the composition of this saving. Second, there are evident differences in the asset ownership probabilities of different birth cohorts. Currently, older households were more likely to hold corporate stock, and less likely to hold tax-exempt bonds, than younger households at any given age. These differences across cohorts are important to recognize when analyzing asset accumulation profiles.

Intermediate Financial Theory

Intermediate Financial Theory
Author: Jean-Pierre Danthine
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2005-07-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0080509029

The second edition of this authoritative textbook continues the tradition of providing clear and concise descriptions of the new and classic concepts in financial theory. The authors keep the theory accessible by requiring very little mathematical background. First edition published by Prentice-Hall in 2001- ISBN 0130174467.The second edition includes new structure emphasizing the distinction between the equilibrium and the arbitrage perspectives on valuation and pricing, as well as a new chapter on asset management for the long term investor."This book does admirably what it sets out to do - provide a bridge between MBA-level finance texts and PhD-level texts....many books claim to require little prior mathematical training, but this one actually does so. This book may be a good one for Ph.D students outside finance who need some basic training in financial theory or for those looking for a more user-friendly introduction to advanced theory. The exercises are very good." --Ian Gow, Student, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University - Completely updated edition of classic textbook that fills a gap between MBA level texts and PHD level texts - Focuses on clear explanations of key concepts and requires limited mathematical prerequisites - Updates includes new structure emphasizing the distinction between the equilibrium and the arbitrage perspectives on valuation and pricing, as well as a new chapter on asset management for the long term investor

Efficient Portfolios When Housing Needs Change Over the Life-Cycle

Efficient Portfolios When Housing Needs Change Over the Life-Cycle
Author: Guglielmo Weber
Publisher:
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

We address the issue of the efficiency of household portfolios in the presence of housing risk. We treat housing stock as an asset and rents as a stochastic liability stream: over the life-cycle, households can be short or long in their net housing position. Efficient financial portfolios are the sum of a standard Markowitz portfolio and a housing risk hedge term that multiplies net housing wealth. Our empirical results show that net housing plays a key role in determining which household portfolios are inefficient. The largest proportion of inefficient portfolios obtains among those with positive net housing, who should invest more in stocks.

Dynamic Asset Allocation in the Presence of Housing and Incomplete Markets

Dynamic Asset Allocation in the Presence of Housing and Incomplete Markets
Author: Rune Mølgaard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

This paper studies in continuous time and in an incomplete market setting the optimal housing, consumption, labor and portfolio choice of an agent in the presence of stochastic house prices and wages. Thus, the house prices and wage rates cannot be spanned by the financial market. In particular, the paper investigates the optimal strategies under two different preference specifications with respect to housing. The paper provides new closed-form solutions in the special case in which the market is complete. In addition, the paper also studies the optimal housing, consumption, labor, portfolio and welfare implications of frictions in the housing market. Particularly, the optimal strategies and welfare loss are analyzed if the house is a non-traded asset. This paper suggests that the consumption, labor, speculative investment and hedging of human capital is similar across preference specification and frictions in the market for housing when the economy is complete. The consumption and labor strategies are, however, dependent on frictions in the market for housing in the case where the economy is incomplete. The welfare loss from these frictions is small in magnitude but will influence the optimal consumption, labor and portfolio choice.