Asset Market Participation and Portfolio Choice over the Life‐Cycle

Using error‐free data on life‐cycle portfolio allocations of a large sample of Norwegian households, we document a double adjustment as households age: a rebalancing of the portfolio composition away from stocks as they approach retirement and stock market exit after retirement. When structurally estimating an extended life‐cycle model, the parameter combination that best fits the data is one with a relatively large risk aversion, a small per‐period participation cost, and a yearly probability of a large stock market loss in line with the frequency of stock market crashes in Norway.     

Endogenous Life‐Cycle Housing Investment and Portfolio Allocation

This paper develops a life‐cycle portfolio allocation model to address the effects of housing investment on the portfolio allocation of households. The model employs a comprehensive housing investment structure, Epstein–Zin recursive preferences, and a stock market entry cost. Furthermore, rather than resorting to calibration we estimate the value of the relative risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The model shows that housing investment has a strong crowding out effect on investment in risky assets throughout the life‐cycle. We further find that the effect of the presence of housing investment on households portfolio allocation is larger than the effect of having EZ recursive preferences.     

Life‐Cycle Expenditure and Retirees’ Cost of Living

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we document the expenditure life‐cycle profile in the United Kingdom and show how differences in the consumption bundle of retirees and workers translate into different inflation experiences. Albeit different in given years, the inflation experienced by the two groups is not significantly different over a long time period. We also show how the distribution of household inflation evolved over time, with particular emphasis on the period around the latest financial crisis. Second, we estimate an Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) demand system and compute the change in the cost of living and the substitution effect for both retirees and workers for the period 1990–2014. Finally, we show how pension income would evolve during that period under three alternative indexation measures for different cohorts of retirees. The indexation measure that results in the highest pension income depends on the time of retirement.     

家庭人口年龄结构、养老保险与家庭金融资产配置

在人口老龄化程度加深和金融市场快速发展的背景下,研究家庭人口年龄结构、家庭成员参加养老保险情况和家庭资产配置三者之间的关系有重要意义。通过运用中国家庭金融调查2011年数据,分析家庭人口年龄结构老化程度对家庭成员参加基本养老保险情况的影响,以及二者对家庭金融资产配置的影响。研究表明:家庭人口年龄结构老化程度越高,家庭成员参加养老保险的比例越高,该效应城市高于农村;家庭人口年龄结构老化程度越高,家庭持有金融资产的概率和比重越低;养老保险对家庭金融资产产生收入效应和替代效应,家庭收入较低时,替代效应较大。     

On the Asset Allocation of a Default Pension Fund

We characterize the optimal default fund in a defined contribution (DC) pension plan. Using detailed data on individuals' holdings inside and outside the pension system, we find substantial heterogeneity within and between passive and active investors in terms of labor income, financial wealth, and stock market participation. We build a life‐cycle consumption‐savings model, with a DC pension account and an opt‐out/default choice, that produces realistic investor heterogeneity. Relative to a common age‐based allocation, implementing the optimal default asset allocation implies a welfare gain of 1.5% during retirement. Much of the gain is attainable with a simple rule of thumb.     

养老目标风险基金资产配置策略研究

养老目标基金是基金公司围绕养老金投资管理、完善资本市场资金结构而推出的创新产品.本文借助理论模型还原了国外养老目标风险基金产品资产配置风险控制和目标风险两个策略的数理模型,并结合中国市场要求、调整核心参数,设计了8种策略,最后基于2005年1月3日至2019年9月30日内的收益率数据进行回测检验.研究表明,在控制风险效...     

How Taxes and Welfare Benefits Affect Work Incentives: A Life‐Cycle Perspective

Personal taxes and benefits affect the incentive to work over the life cycle by altering income–age profiles, insuring against adverse shocks and changing the returns to human capital. In this paper, we show how a life‐cycle perspective alters our impression of how the UK tax and benefit system affects women's work incentives. Given that actual longitudinal data conflate age effects, cohort effects and policy effects, and, in the UK, are not available covering the full life cycle, we use simulated data produced by a rich, dynamic structural model of female labour supply and human capital that incorporates family formation and fertility. We find that individuals experience considerable variability in work incentives across life that outweighs the variability across individuals. Changes in the presence of children and a partner, as well as the level of any partner's earnings, are key to explaining these patterns: work incentives vary dramatically depending on family composition and the earnings of any partner, especially for the lower‐skilled, and most women experience a number of different family types during the course of their lives.     

An Examination of ERR and Asset Allocation in Public Pension Plans

In this paper, we examine the usefulness of expected rates of return (ERR) for public pension plans. Specifically, we test the correlation between the expected rate of return on plan assets and asset allocation. We also examine the predictive power of ERR on the actual returns of the pension assets. We find that the correlation between expected return and the percentage of assets that are equity securities is relatively weak. Further, we find that the percentage of assets that are equity securities is a much better predictor of actual returns than the disclosed expected return in public pension plans. These results provide evidence to support SFAS No. 87 , which requires the disclosure of plan assets and against recently promulgated SFAS No. 132 , which eliminates this disclosure requirement. The evidence also supports GASB 25'sStatement of Net Plan Assets .     

A Shrinkage Approach to Model Uncertainty and Asset Allocation

This article takes a shrinkage approach to examine the empiricalimplications of aversion to model uncertainty. The shrinkageapproach explicitly shows how predictive distributions incorporatedata and prior beliefs. It enables us to solve the optimal portfoliosfor uncertainty-averse investors. Aversion to uncertainty aboutthe capital asset pricing model leads investors to hold a portfoliothat is not mean-variance efficient for any predictive distribution.However, mean-variance efficient portfolios corresponding toextremely strong beliefs in the Fama–French model areapproximately optimal for uncertainty-averse investors. Theempirical Bayes approach does not result in optimal portfoliosfor investors who are averse to model uncertainty.     

Financing Decisions along a Firm’s Life‐cycle: Debt as a Commitment Device

We analyse the life‐cycle patterns of a firm’s financing decisions and their interaction with future growth and development decisions. We derive different financing sequences which we link to existing empirical research as well as derive new testable hypotheses regarding differences in firms’ financing decisions to project, firm, market and country characteristics. We provide a rationale for the importance of (external) start‐up debt financing as observed in recent empirical studies. Furthermore, we argue that equity financing at both development stages is more likely for closely‐held firms and in countries in which entrepreneurs face high stigmatisation costs.     

经济周期视角下全国社会保障基金的战术资产配置

本文按照全国社会保障基金投资管理暂行办法,将社会保障基金的投资组合资产分为银行存款,国债,企业债,金融债,证券投资基金和股票资产6个种类,采用宏观经济的月度指标将我国经济周期划分为4个阶段:衰退阶段、复苏阶段、繁荣阶段和滞涨阶段。根据美林证券的投资时钟理论,统计并分析这6类资产在不同的经济阶段的收益状况。同时,我们在全国社会保障基金投资管理办法的约束条件下,采用均值-方差模型,对全国社会保障基金进行最优资产模拟配置。数据模拟结果表明:在衰退阶段,应尽可能多地配置债券资产;在复苏阶段,应尽量降低现金资产的权重,提高债券资产和委托证券资产的权重;在繁荣阶段,应降低债券资产的配置比重;在滞涨阶段,应尽可能地增加现金持有的权重。并且,本文还针对均值—方差模型固有的缺乏鲁棒性的缺陷,采用Resample方法对模拟结果进行改进,使得资产的配置更加稳健可靠。     

随机规划模型与商业银行资产的最优配置

有关商业银行资产负债管理模型的研究表明,基于多阶段带简单补偿的资产负债随机模型适合现阶段中国商业银行的资产负债管理问题。本文建立了三大国有上市商业银行的简化资产负债管理模型,运用遗传算法进行运算求解。模型结果能反映商业银行资产配置的基本变化趋势;贷款配置比例始终大于债券投资比例,表明银行仍然立足于传统信贷业务;三大商业银行的最优资产配置略有差异。考虑到商业银行资产收益率以及存款负债流的不确定性,实证结果表明该模型对实际管理决策具有现实指导意义。     

A Test of the Modigliani‐Miller Invariance Theorem and Arbitrage in Experimental Asset Markets

Modigliani and Miller show that the total market value of a firm is unaffected by a repackaging of asset return streams to equity and debt if pricing is arbitrage‐free. We investigate this invariance theorem in experimental asset markets, finding value‐invariance for assets of identical risks when returns are perfectly correlated. However, exploiting price discrepancies has risk when returns have the same expected value but are uncorrelated, in which case the law of one price is violated. Discrepancies shrink in consecutive markets, but persist even with experienced traders. In markets where overall trader acuity is high, assets trade closer to parity.     

Real Asset Valuation: A Back‐to‐basics Approach

Different valuation methods can lead to different corporate investment decisions, and the conventional “static, single discount rate” DCF approach in particular is biased against many of the kinds of decisions that corporate managers tend to view as “strategic.” Reducing the bias from valuations involves two main tasks: treating risk in a way that is consistent with observed market pricing, and accounting for the ability of companies to make decisions “dynamically” over time. The authors propose two separate tools, market‐based valuation and complete decision tree analysis, for accomplishing these two improvements in valuation. The authors also suggest working with the full distribution of future cash flows, one possible realization at a time, rather than working with the aggregate measure of expected cash flow. From a technical perspective, it is necessary to work with the full distribution to value real options properly. Valuing the cash flows one realization at a time also leads to a much better understanding of the interaction between economy‐level, systematic risks and local asset‐level, technical risks. Just as important, the proposed approaches support an effective division of labor between local asset managers, who are better positioned to model technical considerations and other asset specifics, and the central finance staff, who can ensure the consistent treatment of economy‐wide risk and to create the rules of engagement for evaluating opportunities. After presenting an overview of both the valuation and the organizational issues, the authors present a case involving a corporate investment in carbon capture and storage that illustrates both the application of the proposed methods and the various sources of bias in the typical DCF analysis.     

Long‐Run Consumption Risk and Asset Allocation under Recursive Utility and Rational Inattention

We study the portfolio decision of a household with limited information‐processing capacity (rational inattention [RI]) in a setting with recursive utility. We find that RI combined with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty could lead to a significant drop in the share of portfolios held in risky assets, even when the departure from the standard expected utility setting with full‐information rational expectations is small. In addition, we show that the equilibrium equity premium increases with the degree of inattention because inattentive investors with recursive utility face greater long‐run risk and thus require higher compensation in equilibrium.     

A Bayesian Model Comparison for Trend‐Cycle Decompositions of Output

We compare a number of widely used trend‐cycle decompositions of output in a formal Bayesian model comparison exercise. This is motivated by the often markedly different results from these decompositions—different decompositions have broad implications for the relative importance of real versus nominal shocks in explaining variations in output. Using U.S. quarterly real GDP, we find that the overall best model is an unobserved components model with two features: (i) a nonzero correlation between trend and cycle innovations and (ii) a break in trend output growth in 2007. The annualized trend output growth decreases from about 3.4% to 1.2%–1.5% after the break. The results also indicate that real shocks are more important than nominal shocks. The slowdown in trend output growth is robust when we expand the set of models to include bivariate unobserved components models.     

Accounting‐based Risk Management and the Capital Asset Pricing Model: An Empirical Comparison

Accounting‐based risk management (ABRM) is a theoretically consistent and practical tool for calculating the cost of capital from underlying financial ratios. In this paper, a sample of ABRM‐generated discount factors is used to generate risk‐adjusted returns, which are compared to CAPM equivalent discount factors. In view of the debates about CAPM's validity, alternative models, the nature and scale of the equity risk premium, and the importance of discount rates in capital budgeting and asset valuation, ABRM's characteristics and resulting discount rates offer a potentially useful alternative. Results suggest that although average discount rates are comparable, their cross‐sectional distributions are dissimilar, so that investors in an average risky firm are overcompensated for systematic risk when using CAPM discount rates, because CAPM discount factors overestimate risk arising from fixed costs in most firms.     

Accountants’ Whistle‐Blowing Intentions: The Impact of Retaliation,Age, and Gender

Accounting practices and the role of auditors have been widely implicated in many corporate scandals. Accountants are likely to witness serious wrongdoings at their workplace, presenting them with a difficult choice as to whether or not to whistle‐blow. This study reports online survey results of whistle‐blowing intentions of the members of Certified Practising Accountants of Australia. The study provides data on the effect of threat of retaliation, age and gender on accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle. The results show a complex interaction effect of retaliation, participants’ age, and gender on their propensity to blow the whistle. Among the early career accountants, male accountants are more likely than female accountants to blow the whistle. Accountants in the mid‐age group are not only likely to whistle‐blow when there is retaliation but also tend to be more willing to do so when that retaliation involves a direct personal loss rather than a loss to their associates. Accountants in the age group of 45 years or above respond to retaliation differently depending on their gender. Specifically, female accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle in this age group tends to decline as the retaliation threat increases from weak to strong, yet the change in retaliation threat has little impact on male accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle. These results and their implications are discussed.     

基于货币供应周期的股市周期拐点判别与资产配置研究

本文拟以中国A股市场为研究对象,尝试找出中国货币周期转换与股市周期之间的关联,考察货币周期不同阶段中股票市场的表现与行业轮动规律,并在此基础上给出适宜的资产配置策略。