Life‐cycle asset accumulation and allocation in Canada

Abstract.  This paper documents the life‐cycle patterns of household portfolios in Canada, and investigates several hypotheses about asset accumulation and allocation. Inferences are drawn from the 1999 Survey of Financial Security, with some comparisons to earlier wealth surveys from 1977 and 1984. I find cross‐sectional evidence for asset decumulation at older ages when annuitized assets like pension wealth are included in the analysis. I also find that the portfolio share of financial assets increases sharply with age, while indicators of risk tolerance appear to decrease. This is consistent with families' desiring more liquid and less risky assets as they age. JEL classification: D31, E21, G11     

Stochastic optimization applied to self-financing portfolio: does bequest matter?

The article studies stochastic optimization of an intertemporal consumption model to allocate financial assets between risky and risk-free assets. We use a stochastic optimization technique, in which utility is maximized subject to a self-financing portfolio constraint. The papers in literature have estimated the errors of Euler equations using data from financial markets. It has been shown that it is sufficient to test the first order Euler equation implied by the model. However, they all assume a constant consumption–wealth ratio that constrains the boundary conditions, hence influencing the coefficient of the risk premium. The main contribution of our article is that we drop the assumption of a constant consumption–wealth ratio. We have an analytical solution using a utility maximization model with a stochastic self-financing portfolio. We introduce a terminal condition of wealth with and without bequests. We also simulate the stochastic optimization with a self-financing portfolio, distinguishing risk neutral investors (γ-low) from high risk averse investors (γ-high). We show that the model with bequest has a higher level of wealth and a smoother decline of consumption over time than the model with no bequest at the end of the period. The model with no bequest has the same level of consumption and a sharp fall at the end of the period. Risk averse agents with high return assets have a higher amount of wealth than risk-neutral agents with lower return assets.     

流动性、生命周期与投资组合相异性——中国投资者行为调查实证分析

本文采用Probit和Tobit模型对中国居民的股票市场参与和投资组合的影响因素进行了分析,主要有以下的实证发现:首先,不流动性资产特别是房地产的投资显著影响了投资者的股票市场参与和投资组合,而且影响以“替代”效应或者说“挤出”效应为主。其次,投资者在进行投资组合时极少利用股票市场对其未来现金流所承担的风险进行对冲,也就是说,中国居民投资的“生命周期效应”不明显;第三,中国居民投资的“财富效应”非常显著。财富的增加既增加了居民参与股票市场的概率,也增加了居民参与股票市场的深度。     

投资理性、居民金融资产选择与储蓄大搬家

本文通过一个加入交易成本的两期资产选择模型,对目前城镇居民储蓄迅速搬家股市而农村居民几乎不持有风险资产这两种并存现象的巨大反差提供了一个较为合理的解释.研究发现当持有风险资产存在成本时,财富水平的高低和交易成本的大小是居民决定是否持有一定数量风险资产的重要因素.二元经济结构下的城乡收入差距显著,财富分布极不均等,交易成本的不对称是阻碍农村居民投资风险资产的主要原因.在众多影响风险资产持有水平的因素中,高风险升水所带来的财富效应主导了其它因素的影响.     

Precautionary Saving,Financial Risk,and Portfolio Choice

Relying on a direct question about the desired amount of precautionary wealth from the 2002 wave of the Italian “Survey of Household Income and Wealth,” I assess the main determinants of the precautionary motive for saving, focusing on the role played by financial risk on households' saving decisions. Households that invest mainly in safe assets do not need to protect themselves against future and unexpected financial losses. Consequently, once we control for households' sources of risk beside financial ones, the amount of precautionary savings of a household investing exclusively in safe assets should be lower compared to households who detain a non‐negligible share of risky assets in their portfolio. Results show that, as expected, a strong and negative correlation exists between the desired amount of precautionary wealth and the ownership of a portfolio made exclusively of safe assets.     

The Influence of Different Investment Horizons on Risk Behavior

For longer investment periods, investment consultants usually recommend a larger proportion of risky assets for investor portfolios. We examine the effect of different investment horizons on investors' risk behavior. We are interested both in participants' risk perceptions and in their asset allocation behavior. We find significant underestimations of long-term risks, which lead to a higher proportion of risky assets in the long-term portfolios. Our data show that the belief in mean reversion is a potential explanation for this behavior.     

Optimal diversification and risk-taking: a theoretical and empirical analysis

Among the justifications for capital property income received by private households is that it is a ‘return to risk-taking’. However, portfolio diversification provides an obvious means toward the reduction of risk. Moreover, it is widely believed that the wealthier the household, the more diversification it practices: the larger tends to be the proportion of its total portfolio allocated to publicly traded stock, and the larger tends to be the number of individual stock issues included in its portfolio. Using a simple ‘homogeneous securities’ model, explicit functional forms are obtained for both the optimal proportion of the portfolio allocated to stocks, and the optimal number of individual stock issues in the portfolio. Empirical evaluation of these theoretical results, using a dataset derived from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), lends substantial support to the model. Applying these empirical results, it is found that as household capital wealth increases, expected capital income increases while simultaneously a reasonable risk indicator (the probability of incurring a negative return on the capital portfolio) decreases owing to the higher level of portfolio diversification. This indication casts significant doubt on the ‘return to risk-taking’ justification for capital property income received by wealthy private households.     

Saving Accounts versus Stocks and Bonds in Household Portfolio Allocation

We study the structure of household portfolios of financial wealth by analyzing both the determinants of total financial wealth and the choice between risky (stocks and bonds) and riskfree assets (saving accounts). The econometric specification is a generalized trivariate Tobit model, estimated on a cross section of 3,077 households in the Netherlands in 1988. We account for endogeneity of financial wealth and for selectivity due to nonreporting. Results show that the level of financial wealth and the marginal tax rate are major determinants of the allocation between riskfree and risky assets.     

Risk Aversion and the Investment Horizon: A New Perspective on the Time Diversification Debate

Investment managers generally subscribe to the principle of time diversification. This implies that a larger portion of the portfolio should be devoted to risky assets as the investment horizon increases. In contrast, academics have shown that for investors with utility functions characterized by constant relative risk aversion, the optimal asset-allocation strategy is independent of the investment horizon. The relative risk aversion in these studies is assumed to be constant both with respect to wealth as well as investment horizon. We suggest a utility function that explicitly captures the notion that individuals are more risk tolerant when the investment horizon is long, thereby validating the intuitively appealing time diversification argument.     

Behavior of Household Portfolios in France: the Role of Housing

The two-dimensional aspects of dwellings occupied by their owner, consumption and investment, make the analysis of households' portfolio choice and the analysis of housing purchases more difficult. But it seems difficult to analyze portfolio decisions without taking account of owner-occupied housing that has an important effect on wealth composition over the life cycle. In this paper we estimated a portfolio choice model where the different dwellings are defined as assets and we showed that we cannot separate investment decisions from housing consumption. Especially, risky assets demand should be greatly influenced by attitudes toward home property.     

考虑基准资产的动态投资组合选取

职业基金经理的目标经常是希望自己的投资组合以稳定的表现能够超越所某一基准资产或组合。因此本文给出一个考虑基准资产的动态均值——方差投资组合选取模型。假设状态之间的转移遵循马氏过程,给定状态转移矩阵,可以得到对风险资产最优投入的解析表达式。此表达式表明对风险资产的投入由三项构成,前两项是不考虑基准资产时对风险资产的投入,最后一项与基准资产有关;在基准资产上的权重由基准资产收益的大小来决定,与积极投资组合管理者的风险厌恶程度无关;随着风险厌恶程度的增加,管理者会减少在风险资产上的投入。数值分析显示考虑基准资产的投资组合是一个积极的投资组合。     

Global financial crisis and dependence risk analysis of sector portfolios: a vine copula approach

We use regular vine (r-vine), canonical vine (c-vine) and drawable vine (d-vine) copulas to examine the dependence risk characteristics of three 20-stock portfolios from the retail, manufacturing and gold-mining equity sectors of the Australian market in periods before, during and after the 2008–2009 global financial crisis (GFC). Our results indicate that the retail portfolio is less risky than the manufacturing counterpart in the crisis period, while the gold-mining portfolio is less risky than both the retail and manufacturing sector portfolios. Both the retail and gold stocks display a higher propensity to yield positively skewed returns in the crisis periods, contrary to the manufacturing stocks. The r-vine is found to best capture the multivariate dependence structure of the stocks in the retail and gold-mining portfolios, while the d-vine does it for the manufacturing stock portfolio. These findings could be used to develop dependence risk- and investment risk-adjusted strategies for investment, rebalancing and hedging which more adequately account for the downside risk in various market conditions.     

Investment horizon effect on asset allocation between value and growth strategies

How does the optimal risk exposure of assets change as their investment horizons increase? Does this impact investment portfolio decision-making, in particular, optimal asset allocation between value and growth strategies over various investment horizons? This paper adopts a new approach to address these questions by examining portfolio allocation between value and growth stocks over various investment horizons. This new approach is based on wavelet analysis, which decomposes the returns of a particular investment strategy across multiple investment horizons. The key empirical results show that the success of pursuing the value strategy (short-selling growth stocks and going long on value stocks) is impacted by the approach used to classify value and growth stock returns. We explore two common alternatives: Fama-French versus Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500/Barra portfolios. The results using Fama-French portfolios show that as the investment horizon increases, the optimal mean allocation of investors tilts heavily away from growth stocks, particularly for lower and moderate levels of risk aversion. Interestingly, for S&P 500/Barra portfolios the allocation weights between value and growth do not vary much.     

Focusing on volatility information instead of portfolio weights as an aid to investor decisions

When faced with the challenge of forming a portfolio containing a risky and a risk-free asset, investors tend to apply the same portfolio weights independently of the volatility of the risky asset. This “percentage heuristic” can lead to different levels of portfolio risk when the same investor is presented with a more or a less risky asset. Using four experiments, we show that asking investors to choose the return distribution for their portfolio while keeping the exact portfolio weights unknown leads to greater similarity in levels of portfolio volatility (across different levels of risk of the risky asset) than asking investors to choose this distribution while additionally facing the portfolio weights. Higher consistency in risk taking is obtained both between and within test subjects.     

Increasing returns to savings and wealth inequality

In this paper I present an explanation to the fact that in the data wealth is substantially more concentrated than income. Starting from the observation that the composition of households' portfolios changes towards a larger share of high-yield assets as the level of net worth increases, I first use data on historical asset returns and portfolio composition by wealth level to construct an empirical return function. I then augment an Overlapping Generation version of the standard neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic labor income risk and missing insurance markets to allow for returns on savings to be increasing in the level of accumulated assets. The quantitative properties of the model are examined and show that an empirically plausible difference between the return faced by poor and wealthy agents is able to generate a substantial increase in wealth inequality compared to the basic model, enough to match the Gini index and all but the top 1 percentile of the US distribution of wealth.     

Estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution accounting for stockholder-specific portfolios

This article estimates the elasticity of intertemporal substitution using stockholder actual return experience. The approach is motivated by numerous data sources indicating that the median US stockholder has a portfolio composed of only three or four individual stocks, rather than a well-diversified portfolio as suggested by portfolio theory. Therefore, representing an individual stockholder portfolio by a proxy financial index (the common approach taken in the literature) may be too rough an approximation of investor behaviour and lead to biased results about risk aversion and intertemporal substitution. Eschewing the financial index methodology, our results support the standard representative agent assumption that there is a high degree of homogeneity in the elasticity of intertemporal substitution across stockholders with different wealth levels. Our findings have implications for models that assess the comovement between consumption and return on stocks.     

Precautionary Saving and Health Insurance: A Portfolio Choice Perspective

This paper analyzes the impact of health insurance on household portfolio choice. Using the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finance and Health Retirement Survey databases, it finds that insured households are more likely to own stocks and invest a larger proportion of financial assets in stocks than uninsured households do. The results remain strong even after controlling for household characteristics and reverse causality. Further, the results are robust across different survey years and data sources. It suggests that a precautionary motive is strong in household portfolio choice decisions.     

Optimal investment and consumption with return predictability and execution costs

We provide a closed-form solution to an optimal investment and consumption problem for a constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) agent, who faces execution costs when trading correlated risky assets with return predictability. The optimal investment strategy indicates that the agent should trade gradually toward a dynamic aim portfolio, which is an adjusted Merton portfolio with modifications to account for the persistence of the return-predicting signals and the execution costs. The optimal consumption strategy is quadratic in the return-predicting signals and linear in the agent's wealth. Our numerical studies show that the execution costs diminish the importance of asset return predictability on the agent's optimal investment strategy, thereby confirming the conjecture raised by Liu (2004). In addition, the presence of the intermediate consumption leads to a more aggressive aim portfolio than the case without consumption.     

Saving rates and portfolio choice with subsistence consumption

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively and quantitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the higher fraction of personal wealth held in risky assets by the rich, and (iii) the higher volatility of consumption of the wealthier. On the contrary, time-variant “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” weighted average consumption which plays the role of moving benchmark subsistence consumption gives the same portfolio composition and saving rates across the rich and the poor, failing to reconcile the model with what micro data say.     

Multi-period portfolio optimization under possibility measures

A single-period portfolio selection theory provides optimal tradeoff between the mean and the variance of the portfolio return for a future period. However, in a real investment process, the investment horizon is usually multi-period and the investor needs to rebalance his position from time to time. Hence it is natural to extend the single-period fuzzy portfolio selection to the multi-period case based on the possibility theory. In this paper, we propose the possibilistic expected value and variance for the terminal wealth with fuzzy forms after T periods by using the central value operator. Classes of multi-period possibilistic mean-variance models are formulated originally under the assumption that the proceeds of risky assets are fuzzy variables. Besides, we apply a particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the proposed multi-period fuzzy portfolio selection models. A numerical example is given to illustrate the performance of the proposed models and algorithm.