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.

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.

Financial Markets and the Real Economy

Financial Markets and the Real Economy
Author: John H. Cochrane
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1933019158

Financial Markets and the Real Economy reviews the current academic literature on the macroeconomics of finance.

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation
Author: Martin Feldstein
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1983
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Inflation, Tax Rules, and Capital Formation brings together fourteen papers that show the importance of the interaction between tax rules and monetary policy. Based on theoretical and empirical research, these papers emphasize the importance of including explicit specifications of the tax system in such study.

The Mind of Wall Street

The Mind of Wall Street
Author: Leon Levy
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2009-03-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0786730153

As stock prices and investor confidence have collapsed in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, and the dot-com crash, people want to know how this happened and how to make sense of the uncertain times to come. Into the breach comes one of Wall Street's legendary investors, Leon Levy, to explain why the market so often confounds us, and why those who ought to understand it tend to get chewed up and spat out. Levy, who pioneered many of the innovations and investment instruments that we now take for granted, has prospered in every market for the past fifty years, particularly in today's bear market. In The Mind of Wall Street he recounts stories of his successes and failures to illustrate how investor psychology and willful self-deception so often play critical roles in the process. Like his peers George Soros and Warren Buffett, Levy takes a long and broad view of the rhythms of the markets and the economy. He also offers a provocative analysis of the spectacular Internet bubble, showing that the market has not yet completely recovered from its bout of "irrational exuberance." The Mind of Wall Street is essential reading for all of us, whether we are active traders or simply modest contributors to our 401(k) plans, as volatile and unnerving markets come to define so much of our net worth.

Growth Or Glamour?

Growth Or Glamour?
Author: John Y. Campbell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 66
Release: 2005
Genre: Stocks
ISBN:

The cash flows of growth stocks are particularly sensitive to temporary movements in aggregate stock prices (driven by movements in the equity risk premium), while the cash flows of value stocks are particularly sensitive to permanent movements in aggregate stock prices (driven by market-wide shocks to cash flows.) Thus the high betas of growth stocks with the market's discount-rate shocks, and of value stocks with the market's cash-flow shocks, are determined by the cash-flow fundamentals of growth and value companies. Growth stocks are not merely "glamour stocks" whose systematic risks are purely driven by investor sentiment. More generally, accounting measures of firm-level risk have predictive power for firms' betas with market-wide cash flows, and this predictive power arises from the behavior of firms' cash flows. The systematic risks of stocks with similar accounting characteristics are primarily driven by the systematic risks of their fundamentals.

Measuring Market Risk

Measuring Market Risk
Author: Kevin Dowd
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2003-02-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470855215

The most up-to-date resource on market risk methodologies Financial professionals in both the front and back office require an understanding of market risk and how to manage it. Measuring Market Risk provides this understanding with an overview of the most recent innovations in Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Tail Loss (ETL) estimation. This book is filled with clear and accessible explanations of complex issues that arise in risk measuring-from parametric versus nonparametric estimation to incre-mental and component risks. Measuring Market Risk also includes accompanying software written in Matlab—allowing the reader to simulate and run the examples in the book.

Stock Prices and Monetary Policy

Stock Prices and Monetary Policy
Author: Paul De Grauwe
Publisher: CEPS
Total Pages: 22
Release: 2008
Genre: Monetary policy
ISBN: 929079819X

The question of whether central banks should target stock prices so as to prevent bubbles and crashes from occurring has been hotly debated. This paper analyses this question using a behavioural macroeconomic model. This model generates bubbles and crashes. It analyses how 'leaning against the wind' strategies, which aim to reduce the volatility of stock prices, can help in reducing volatility of output and inflation. We find that such policies can be effective in reducing macroeconomic volatility, thereby improving the trade-off between output and inflation variability. The strength of this result, however, depends on the degree of credibility of the inflation-targeting regime. In the absence of such credibility, policies aiming at stabilising stock prices do not stabilise output and inflation.

The Truth About Inflation

The Truth About Inflation
Author: Paul Donovan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317690044

Inflation is a simple topic, in that the basic concepts are something that everyone can understand. However, inflation is not a simplistic topic. The composition of inflation and what the different inflation measures try to represent cannot be summarised with a single line on a chart or a casual reference to a solitary data point. Investors very often fail to understand the detail behind inflation, and end up making bad investment decisions as a result. The Truth About Inflation does not set out to forecast inflation, but to help improve its understanding, so that investors can make better decisions to achieve the real returns that they need. Starting with a summary of long history of inflation, the drivers of price change are considered. Many of the "urban myths" that have built up about inflation are shown to be a consequence of irrational judgement or political scaremongering. Some behaviour, like the unhealthy veneration of gold as a means of inflation protection, is shown to be the result of historical accident. In the modern era of lower nominal investment returns, inflation inequality (whereby some groups experience persistently higher inflation than others) is a very important consideration. This book sets out the realities of price changes in the modern investing environment, without using economic equations or jargon. It gives investors the framework they need to think about inflation and how to protect themselves against it, whether the aggregate inflation of the future rises or falls from current levels.