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.     

Banks’ Interest Rate Risk and Search for Yield: A Theoretical Rationale and Some Empirical Evidence

We investigate German banks’ exposure to interest rate risk. In finance, higher demand for a risky asset is typically associated with higher expected return. However, employing a utility function which implies both risk‐averse and risk‐seeking behavior depending on the level of profits, we show that this relationship may get weaker and even change its sign at low profit levels. For the period 2005–14, we find not only the common positive relationship of higher expected returns and rising interest rate exposure but also that this relationship does become weaker with falling operative income, its sign eventually changing.     

金融发展对国际贸易结构影响的实证分析*

本文利用外部金融依赖度、有形资产率两个与金融市场相关的指标对金融发展水平与贸易结构的关系进行了实证分析。通过把贸易行业SITC 4位分类数据转换成工业行业ISIC 3位分类数据后,利用多国行业面板数据,对出口贸易结构进行了回归。6个金融发展水平指标的回归系数都表明,金融发展会促进外部金融依赖度高的行业出口和形成比较优势,但是金融发展不利于有形资产率高的行业出口并且会降低其比较优势。对行业净贸易额和净出口比较优势表示的贸易结构进行稳健性检验,结果进一步证明了金融发展是影响贸易结构和比较优势的一个重要原因。     

The possibility of informationally efficient markets

A rational expectations equilibrium with positive demand for financial information does exist under fully revealing asset price—contrary to a wide-held conjecture. Whereas a continuum of investors is inconsistent with fully revealing equilibrium, finitely many investors with average portfolios demand information in equilibrium if they can adjust portfolio size in an additive signal-return model. More information diminishes the expected excess return of a risky asset so that investors who only have a choice of portfolio composition or whose asset endowments strongly differ from the average portfolio are worse off. Under fully revealing price, information market equilibria both with and without information acquisition are Pareto efficient.     

OUTPUT CONTINGENT SECURITIES AND EFFICIENT INVESTMENT BY FIRMS

We analyze competitive economies with risky investments. Unlike the classic Arrow–Debreu framing, firms and agents cannot contract upon the exogenous states underlying production risks. They can trade equities and any security written on the endogenous aggregate output. This financial structure is rich enough to promote efficient risk sharing among consumers. However, markets are incomplete from the production perspective, and the absence of prices for each primitive state of nature raises the question about the objective of firms. We show that output‐contingent asset prices convey sufficient information to compute the competitive shareholder value that leads to efficient investment by firms.     

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.     

A COMOMENT CRITERION FOR THE CHOICE OF RISKY INVESTMENT BY FIRMS*

This article uses Taylor series expansions and the assumption of small risks to derive a comoment criterion that firms should maximize so that the resulting equilibrium is Pareto optimal. This is done in two models of production under uncertainty: the state‐of‐nature model in which the firms’ outputs depend on states of nature and financial markets are complete with respect to these states of nature and the probability model in which the firms’ risky outputs are modeled by their joint probabilities and financial markets span the outcome space of the firms. The comoment criterion provides a unifying framework for the two equilibrium models of production under uncertainty, has the merit of being based on information which is readily available to firms, and provides greater insight than the theoretical criterion into the risk characteristics of its profit stream that a firm should focus on when choosing its investment plan.     

Asymptotic methods for asset market equilibrium analysis

Summary. General equilibrium analysis is difficult when asset markets are incomplete. We make the simplifying assumption that uncertainty is small and use bifurcation methods to compute Taylor series approximations for asset demand and asset market equilibrium. A computer must be used to derive these approximations since they involve large amounts of algebraic manipulation. We use this method to analyze the allocative and welfare effects of introducing a new security. We find that adding any nontrivial derivative security will raise the price of the risky security relative to the bond when risks are small. Received: April 1, 2000; revised version: January 10, 2001     

Optimal Controls for a Large Insurance Under a CEV Model: Based on the Legendre Transform-Dual Method

The purpose of this paper is to consider the optimal proportional reinsurance and investment strategies for an insurance company. The insurer’s surplus process is approximated by a Brownian motion with drift. The insurance company can purchase proportional reinsurance and invest the surplus in a financial market which includes one risk-free asset and one risky asset whose price is modeled by a CEV model. The primary problem is changed to the dual problem by implying Legendre transform. When the objective of the insurance company is to maximize the expected logarithmic utility from terminal wealth, the closed-form expressions for the optimal reinsurance-investment policy which is different to the Merton case to the primal optimal problem are obtained and numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate our results. Moreover, we find an interesting result that risk exposure is non-monotonic in the cost of reinsurance.

     

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。     

金融市场系统风险与资产证券化的相关性

美国金融市场的资产证券化使金融市场的系统风险陡增,并引发了席卷全球的金融危机。资产证券化增加金融市场系统风险的主要原因在于倒买倒卖的市场运作模式、资产支持的证券流动性不足以及资产证券化交易的复杂性所产生的负面效应。金融危机后应加强我国资产证券化金融监管工作,坚持以有限管制和间接管制为原则,减少直接干预;坚持慎重选择资产证券化类型,逐步推进资产证券化原则;坚持以规范的信息披露为原则,防范系统风险。     

Investors' Personality Influences Investment Decisions: Experimental Evidence on Extraversion and Neuroticism

The authors analyze the impact of individuals' degree of extraversion and neuroticism on their decision making in an experimental asset market. To establish this link between research on experimental asset markets and social psychology the authors use a unique approach that combines a questionnaire designed to assess individuals' degree of extraversion and neuroticism and an experimental asset market to assess individual financial decision making. The dataset combines 364 undergraduate business students' questionnaire responses and their trading behavior in the asset market. The authors find that extraversion and neuroticism significantly influence individuals' behavior in the experimental asset market. Specifically, more extraverted individuals pay higher prices for financial assets and they buy more financial assets when assets are overpriced than less extraverted individuals do. More neurotic individuals hold less risky assets in their financial portfolios than less neurotic individuals do. Although a large part of the explanatory power appears to be driven by gender differences, the authors still find significant impact of extraversion and neuroticism after controlling for gender effects. The study findings suggest that further research on financial markets could benefit from including personality of market participants as a crucial explanatory factor.     

The Determinants of Risk Aversion: The Role of Intergenerational Transmission

This article studies the relationship between risk attitudes and individual characteristics focusing on the intergenerational transmission of risk preferences. We use a dataset of a sample of Italian students which allows us to build different measures of risk aversion based, respectively, on a survey asking students about their willingness to invest in a risky asset and about their preferences for job security and on the results of an entry test using explicit penalty points in the case of incorrect answers. In line with the findings highlighted by the existing literature, we find that women are more risk averse than men, more patient subjects are more risk averse, while high‐ability students are less risk averse. As far as intergenerational transmission of preferences is concerned, it emerges that students whose fathers are entrepreneurs have a higher propensity to take risks, while students whose fathers are employed in the public sector are more risk averse. Only fathers matter with regards to their children's risk attitudes. These results are robust to different measures of risk aversion and to different specifications of our model.     

Optimal production of innovations under uncertainty

The paper reports results on a risk-neutral firm's research incentives. When unrelated to the firm's own stake in the program, the risks encourage or discourage risky research spending, depending on the properties of the research technology available. A non-decreasing time path of information builds the idea of an asymmetric probability distribution of the state of knowledge into the model. It follows that the required return on risky investments may actually fall short of the safe return. Since it is the upside risk that dominates, increased controllable risks will increase incentives for risky innovative activity. It is proved, but only in a more restricted framework (with differentiable processes), that the expectational effects involved will strengthen the positive relationship between controllable risks and the expected return.I am greatly indebted to three anonymous referees for helpful suggestions and to the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation for financial support.     

Bubbles and Crises

In recent financial crises a bubble, in which asset prices rise, is followed by a collapse and widespread default. Bubbles are caused by agency relationships in the banking sector. Investors use money borrowed from banks to invest in risky assets, which are relatively attractive because investors can avoid losses in low payoff states by defaulting on the loan. This risk shifting leads investors to bid up the asset prices. Risk can originate in both the real and financial sectors. Financial fragility occurs when positive credit expansion is insufficient to prevent a crisis.     

The design of a consumption tax under capital risk

This paper focuses on the design of a consumption tax in a world of capital risk. The certainty literature discusses two standard options, namely the cash flow method and the pre-payment method (i.e., the wage tax), and finds the two approaches to be equivalent. Models that consider capital risk (via asset choice) reach different conclusions. This discrepancy arises in part due to a different choice of the social discount rate. In light of the failure of the discount-rate argument to resolve the issue at hand, we explore the market certainty equivalence of risky government revenue. We let revenue risks stay in the private sector, and examine the market value of the feasible transfer (e.g., in the form of a public good) back to households. We reach three broad conclusions. First, we find that if the state returns to each household its own tax-revenue risks, equivalence will be re-established as in certainty models. Next, we show that if the state engages in intergenerational risk sharing (e.g., through a system of stochastic tax transfers), the wage tax cannot be construed to be a valid pre-payment alternative to the cash flow or a modified wage-tax-ation system. Efficient risk allocation across generations under a cash flow tax (or, one that includes future capital gains as well as wages in the tax base) leads to a Pareto improvement over the simple wage tax. Finally, a major policy implication follows; in order to be practicable, a consumption tax would have to be implemented via registered savings accounts much in the fashion of the Canadian registered retirement savings plans program rather than through the pre-payment route.     

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.     

Growth Optimal Investment Strategy: The Impact of Reallocation Frequency and Heavy Tails

The strategy to maximize the long‐term growth rate of final wealth (maximum expected log strategy, maximum geometric mean strategy, Kelly criterion) is based on probability theoretic underpinnings and has asymptotic optimality properties. This article reviews the allocation of wealth in a two‐asset economy with one risky asset and a risk‐free asset. It is also shown that the optimal fraction to be invested in the risky asset (i) depends on the length of the basic return period and (ii) is lower for heavy‐tailed log returns than for light‐tailed log returns.     

Assessing excess liquidity in the euro area: the role of sectoral distribution of money

The strong and prolonged deviation of money growth from its reference value since 2001 has caused concern among policy-makers about the upside risks to price stability from monetary developments. In this article we provide evidence that these risks might have been smaller until 2005 than regularly assumed. Three basic findings support this view. First, a sectoral breakdown of money holdings shows that current excess liquidity conditions have been partly related to the acceleration of nonbank financial intermediaries’ money demand, as well as to the accumulation of marketable instruments. Such increases are likely to be associated more to portfolio choices than to transaction motives. Second, evidence from balance sheet data on investment funds points to a general increase in the relative importance of this sector in the economy, rather than to a higher degree of liquidity of their asset positions, thus reflecting, to a large extent, a permanent change in the financial structure of the economy. Third, excess liquidity measures that exclude nonbank financial intermediaries’ money holdings have more predictive power for future inflation at medium-term horizons than those that include them.     

Corporate insurance with optimal financial contracting

Summary. This paper attemps to rationalize the use of insurance covenants in financial contracts, and shows how external financing generates a demand for insurance by risk-neutral entrepreneurs. In our model, the entrepreneur needs external financing for a risky project that can be affected by an accident during its realization. Accident losses and final returns are private information to the firm, but they can be evaluated by two costly auditing technologies. We derive the optimal financial contract: it is a bundle of a standard debt contract and an insurance contract with franchise, trading off bankruptcy costs vs auditing costs. We then analyze how this optimal contract can be achieved by decentralized trading on competitive markets when insurance and credit activities are exogenously separated. With additive risks, the insurance contract involves full coverage above a straight deductible. We interpret this result by showing how our results imply induced risk aversion for risk-neutral firms. Received: December 14, 1998; revised version: August 11, 1999