preferred risk habitat of individual investors abstract the preferred risk habitat hypothesis introduced here is that individual investors select stocks whose volatilities are commensurate with their risk aversion the data 1995 2000 holdings of over 20 000 clients at a large german broker are consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis the returns of stocks within each portfolio have remarkably similar volatilities when stocks are sold they are replaced by stocks of similar volatilities and the more risk averse customers indeed hold less volatile stocks greater volatility specialization is associated with lower sharpe ratios primarily because more specialized investors hold fewer stocks and thereby expose themselves to more unsystematic risk

ex day behavior with dividend preference and limitations to short term arbitrage the case of swedish lottery bonds abstract swedish lottery bonds offer a unique opportunity to study ex day effects in an environment where cash distributions are tax advantaged relative to capital gains thus in the lottery bond market we observe a reversal of the preference for capital gains that researchers have cited as an explanation for the ex day behavior of u s equities further in this market there are barriers to short term arbitrage when prices do reflect the tax preferences of individual investors we find the bonds are priced around the ex day to reflect differential tax rates on income and capital gains consistent with the prevailing tax regimes the bonds consistently experience negative returns over the coupon payment period and in fact often sell at negative yields prior to the cash distribution as one would expect given tax motivated trading between high tax investors who buy prior to the distribution and low tax investors who buy after the distribution

the impact of futures price targeting on the precision and credibility of monetary policy this paper analyzes the hypothesis that the targeting of macroeconomic aggregates can be done more effectively by pegging the price of a futures contract linked to future announcements of the policy target where there is an information lag futures price targeting may be more efficient than a contingent money supply rule a policy of futures price targeting would be less likely to suffer from the time inconsistency problem the use of futures price targeting would also appear to be superior to policies based on intermediate targeting as well as most types of discretion copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

interest bearing currency legal restrictions and the rate of return dominance of money note the rate of return dominance of money is the crucial anomaly of monetary theory at least this is the position taken by j r hicks in his seminal paper a suggestion for simplifying the theory of money 1935 hicks was concerned about the coexistence of non interest bearing money and real assets whether real assets which are innately risky actually dominate money is of course debatable as tobin 1958 points out the dominance seems unambiguous however when the money is unbacked non interest bearing currency and the competing asset is default free interest bearing government bonds such bonds are promises to pay the unbacked currency and the government is typically the sole legal provider of the unbacked currency the promised currency being unbacked makes the default free claim of the government more plausible this paper considers various explanations of the rate of return dominance of money and defends the legal restrictions view the rate of return dominance of money has been explained by costs of trips to the bank this explanation was the one put forward by hicks baumol 195 and tobin 1956 developed this idea in the inventory model of money this approach assumes that trade is carried out in a non interest bearing currency and that trade directly using a bank s portfolio is impossible the rate of return dominance of money has been explained by costs of intermediation banks intermediate their portfolios into claims that are convenient for trade but doing so is costly friedman 1969 considers the costly intermediation of bonds into interest bearing demand deposits and currency stating competition among banks would force them to pay interest on deposits at a rate falling short of rb the bond rate by the costs of running the banks competition would force banks also to pay interest on currency at a rate below the rate paid on deposits by the extra costs of administering the payment of interest on currency they would of course have an incentive to devise an economical way to pay such interest p 39 bryant and wallace 1979 1980a model the costly intermediation of government bonds into

cautious risk takers investor preferences and demand for active management actively managed mutual funds have distinct return distributions from their passive benchmarks and our theoretical analysis using tail sensitive risk preferences suggests that active value and growth funds may serve to reduce downside risk and capture upside potential respectively furthermore tail sensitivity measures estimated from the empirical pricing kernel have significant explanatory power for active fund flows even after controlling for business cycles and market wide sentiment finally active funds unlike their passive counterparts have exposures to option strategies hedging downside risk or capturing upside potential

the rationale of the mean standard deviation analysis skewness preference and the demand for money publisher summary this chapter discusses the rationale of the mean standard deviation analysis skewness preference and the demand for money in january 1969 issue of the review of economic studies karl borch and martin feldstein separately criticized the widely used mean variance analysis of portfolio selection borch contended that any system of upward sloping mean standard deviation e s indifference curves can be shown to be inconsistent with the basic axiom of choice under uncertainty he pointed out that one can always pick any two points on an upward sloping indifference curve to represent two bernoulli distributions with probability 1 p of gaining the same amount x in both the cases and probability p of gaining y1 in the case of one distribution and y2 in the case of the second distribution with y2 y1 if the second distribution represents the point to the northeast of the other point then by the dominance axiom the second distribution must be preferred to the first which contradicts the basic meaning of indifference curves feldstein by using a log utility function and a lognormal distribution for investment outcome showed that e s indifference curves for a risk averter need not be convex downwards though upward sloping they would change from convex to concave once the standard deviation of the outcome exceeds the mean multiplied by on the face of it this seems to suggest that risk aversion might decrease as risk is increased beyond a certain extent

relative efficiency of cotton farms in sudanese irrigated agriculture abstract in this paper the lau yotopoulos profit function model is applied to data from the sudan with the objective of investigating the relative technical price and economic efficiency of different groups of cotton farms in the irrigated agricultural sub sector the findings of the paper lend no support to the marshallian based efficiency argument recently utilized by the sudanese government to abolish the joint account system in favor of the land water charge system in all irrigated schemes the findings also establish the economic efficiency superiority of farms under medium staple cotton relative to those under long staple cotton however the hypothesis of absolute price efficiency perfect profit maximization was rejected for all groups of cotton farms the latter result has a bearing on the familiar hypothesis that farmers in the less developed countries are efficient but poor

are women more risk averse we find that single women exhibit relatively more risk aversion in financial decision making than single men using u s sample data we examine household holdings of risky assets to determine whether there are gender differences in financial risk taking as wealth increases the proportion of wealth held as risky assets is estimated to increase by a smaller amount for single women than for single men gender differences in financial risk taking are also influenced by age race and number of children greater financial risk aversion may provide an explanation for women s lower levels of wealth compared with men s jel j16 d81 g11

stockholding behavior of u s households evidence from the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances most households persistently invest in riskless assets but not stocks and may do so because they perceive information required for market participation to be costly relative to expected benefits in a consumption capital asset pricing model ccapm increased risk aversion income risk and lower resources reduce the information expense sufficient to deter stockholding bivariate probit analysis using the 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances shows that households with lower risk aversion higher education and greater wealth who were nonstockholders in 1983 had an increased conditional probability of entering by 1989 whereas 1983 stockholders with lower resources more limited education and greater risk aversion were more likely to be nonstockholders by 1989

the evolution of a free banking system the institutional features of models of unregulated monetary systems have often been arbitrarily and implausibly assumed this paper instead provides realistic grounding for important features by constructing a logical evolutionary account of free banking sophisticated and orderly arrangements are shown to emerge from competition and the pursuit of less costly methods of payment the emergence of standardized commodity money is followed by the development in turn of basic money transfer banking easily transferable bank liubilities and clearinghouses the features of an evolved free banking system differ from those assumed in recent models of competitive payments systems

a theory of disappointment aversion an axiomatic model of preferences over lotteries is developed it is shown that this model is consistent with the allais paradox includes expected utility theory as a special case and is only one parameter beta richer than the expected utility model allais paradox type behavior is identified with positive values of beta preferences with positive beta are said to be disappointment averse it is shown that risk aversion implies disappointment aversion and that the arrow pratt measures of risk aversion can be generalized in a straight forward manner to the current framework copyright 1991 by the econometric society

can interest bearing money circulate a small denomination arkansan experiment 1861 63 legal restrictions theory suggests that dominance of non interest bearing currency is possible only because legal impediments prevent financial institutions from offering interest bearing alternatives a viable interest bearing medium must be issued in denominations low enough for day to day use however and without historical examples of small denomination interest bearing issues we cannot properly test whether interest bearing currency will circulate as legal restrictions theory predicts civil war arkansas offers a rare instance where large quantities of small denomination interest bearing money were actually issued mostly below 5 the results of this arkansan experiment show that small denomination interest bearing issues can indeed function as the primary medium of exchange

parametric tests of allocative efficiency in the manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan this paper estimates allocative inefficiency in the manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan based on an extension of the translog profit function approach we propose a new method to the estimation of allocative inefficiency in two countries or groups the model is estimated using pooled annual data from the large scale manufacturing sectors of india and pakistan over the period 1959 87 we find evidence of allocative inefficiencies in both countries specifically results reveal that manufacturing firms in the two countries over utilize capital and raw materials relative to labour and energy the magnitude of over utilization of capital is more severe in pakistan than in india we argue that these findings are hardly surprising given the structure of factor markets and past government policies in the two countries

interest bearing currency evidence from the civil war experience in interest bearing currency evidence from the civil war experience james gherity 1993 reports an experience with interest bearing notes during the american civil war that runs counter to the predictions of the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money wallace 1983 he concludes that this failure of the legal restrictions theory is best explained by white 1987 and that the experience fails to support makinen and woodward s 1986 explanation of why interest free money is an inherently superior circulating medium he arrives at this latter conclusion based on his own assertion that interest bearing notes may sometimes circulate at par when market participants decide to avoid the transactions costs of calculating the interest that has accumulated on them this comment corrects an analytical error in his paper and clarifies the experience gherity s proposition concerning the avoidance of transactions costs is wrong as a consequence for some of the note issues concerned the legal restrictions theory is refuted more strongly than he indicates but for others it is less so there is little in the experience to discriminate between the white explanation and that of makinen and woodward indeed for some of the note issues neither the legal restrictions theory white nor makinen and woodward adequately explains the behavior that occurred the competing theories

can we improve the structure of financial systems 1993 the main theme of this paper is that several of the characteristics of our present western monetary and banking systems have been crucially dependent on the particular temporal process of historical development and are not an essential feature of more fundamental preferences or technological conditions they exist in part because we take them for granted it is the purpose of this paper to examine what might change in both theory and practice if some of these inessential characteristics were to be changed

individual preferences monetary gambles and stock market participation a case for narrow framing we argue that narrow framing whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation may be a more important feature of decision making than previously realized our starting point is the evidence that people are often averse to a small independent gamble even when the gamble is actuarially favorable we find that a surprisingly wide range of utility functions including many nonexpected utility specifications have trouble explaining this evidence but that this difficulty can be overcome by allowing for narrow framing our analysis makes predictions as to what kinds of preferences can most easily address the stock market participation puzzle

accounting for non interest bearing currency a critique of the legal restrictions theory of money the legal restrictions theory of money developed by neil wallace and others implies that all noncommodity currency would be interest bear ing under laissez faire if the interest rate on bonds is positive this note cites historical evidence to the contrary it then analyzes the source of the legal restrictions theory s inapplicability and o ffers an alternative computation cost based explanation for nonintere st bearing currency copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

cumulative prospect theory option returns and the variance premium the variance premium and the pricing of out of the money otm equity index options are major challenges to standard asset pricing models we develop a tractable equilibrium model with cumulative prospect theory cpt preferences that can overcome both challenges the key insight is that the variance premium can be written as the expected return on a portfolio of otm call and put options and the probability weighting feature of cpt can explain the puzzlingly low returns observed for these options using gmm on a sample of u s index option returns between 1996 and 2010 we show that the cpt model ts well observed option prices and therefore the variance premium in a dynamic setting probability weighting and time varying equity return volatility combine to match the observed time series pattern of the variance premium

the courage of misguided convictions the field of modern financial economics assumes that people behave with extreme rationality but they do not furthermore people s deviations from rationality are often systematic behavioral finance relaxes the traditional assumptions of financial economics by incorporating these observable systematic and very human departures from rationality into standard models of financial markets we highlight two common mistakes investors make excessive trading and the tendency to disproportionately hold on to losing investments while selling winners we argue that these systematic biases have their origins in human psychology the tendency for human beings to be overconfident causes the first bias in investors and the human desire to avoid regret prompts the second

naive diversification strategies in defined contribution saving plans there is a worldwide trend toward defined contribution saving plans and growing interest in privatized social security plans in both environments individuals are given some responsibility to make their own asset allocation decisions raising concerns about how well they do at this task this paper investigates one aspect of the task namely diversification it is shown that some investors follow the 1 n strategy they divide their contributions evenly across the funds offered in the plan consistent with this naive notion of diversification it is found that the proportion invested in stocks depends strongly on the proportion of stock funds in the plan

behavioral portfolio theory we develop a positive behavioral portfolio theory bpt and explore its implications for portfolio construction and security design the optimal portfolios of bpt investors resemble combinations of bonds and lottery tickets consistent with friedman and savage s 1948 observation we compare the bpt efficient frontier with the mean variance efficient frontier and show that in general the two frontiers do not coincide optimal bpt portfolios are also different from optimal capm portfolios in particular the capm twofund separation does not hold in bpt we present bpt in a single mental account version bpt sa and a multiple mental account version bpt ma bpt sa investors integrate their portfolios into a single mental account while bpt ma investors segregate their port folios into several mental accounts bpt ma portfolios resemble layered pyramids where layers are associated with aspirations we explore a two layer portfolio where the low aspiration layer is designed to avoid poverty while the high aspiration layer is designed for a shot at riches

do finance professors invest like everyone else comparing the results of the fed s survey of consumer finances with those of a survey of finance professors at u s universities the authors found that finance professors are significantly more likely than others to invest in equities they also found that finance professors are less prone to behavioral biases because their decision not to invest in equities is based on neither the outcome of their past investments nor their short term expectations of the market see comments and response on this article

asset allocation and individual risk aversion 1992 asset allocation and individual risk aversion financial analysts journal vol 48 no 6 pp 32 37

a theory of anticipated utility abstract a new theory of cardinal utility with an associated set of axioms is presented it is a generalization of the von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability

diversification versus optimality is there really a diversification puzzle abstractin this paper we provide a general valuation of the diversification attitude of investors first we empirically examine the diversification of mean variance optimal choices in the us stock market during the 11 year period 2003 2013 we then analyze the diversification problem from the perspective of risk averse investors and risk seeking investors second we prove that investors optimal choices will be similar if their utility functions are not too distant independent of their tolerance or aversion to risk finally we discuss investors attitude towards diversification when the choices available to investors depend on several parameters

legal restrictions and monetary evolution abstract the legal restrictions school of monetary theory hypothesizes that the use of ordinary currency would die out if legal tender laws were abolished instead interest bearing instruments would be used in transactions this paper refutes the claim as far as it applies to money as a medium of exchange the network externality or coordination convention properties of a medium of exchange imply that the strategy of holding interest bearing instruments is not necessarily individually dominant there is a critical mass of users that has to be assembled before a switch can occur

sovereignty credible commitments and economic prosperity on american indian reservations abstract american indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth because this poverty cannot be explained solely by natural resource physical and human capital constraints institutions are likely to be part of the explanation one of the institutional variables is the sovereign power of tribes which allows tribal governments to act opportunistically the potential for such opportunistic behavior can thwart economic development if tribes are unable to make credible commitments to stable contract enforcement one avenue for credible commitments is public law 280 which required some tribes to turn judicial jurisdiction over civil disputes to the states in which they reside using data for 1969 99 we find that per capita income for american indians on reservations subject to state jurisdiction grew significantly more than it did for indians who were not

household portfolio diversification a case for rank dependent preferences the proliferation of novel preference theories in financial economics is hampered by a lack of non experimental evidence and by the theories additional complexity which has not been shown to be critical in applications in this article i present arguments in support of preferences with rank dependency using the survey of consumer finances data i document two widespread patterns inconsistent with expected utility i many households simultaneously invest in well deversified funds and in poorly diversified portfolios of stocks and ii some households with substantial savings do not invest anything in equities i show that portfolio choice models with rank dependent preferences plausibly parameterized and under fully rational assumptions are quantitatively consistent with the observed diversification these results call for further efforts to integrate the models of rank dependent preferences in portfolio theory and asset pricing the decision theoretic literature has long acknowledged the shortcomings of the expected utility theory of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 several generalizations of the theory are inspired by the experimental evidence and aimed at improving its descriptive accuracy however there are few applications of new models of preferences in finance and expected utility continues to dominate the field 1 two principal hurdles slow the proliferation of novel preferences in financial economics first the lack of empirical non experimental or field data confirming that the behavior motivating non expected utilities is widespread outside the laboratory settings second the additional and often significant complexity of the alternative preferences which has not been shown to be critical in applications where the models based on expected utility fall short of reasonable predictions this article presents empirical and theoretical this paper was previously circulated under the title household portfolio diversification the paper has benefited from the comments of shlomo benartzi luca benzoni markus brunnermeier john dickhaut maria perozek raj singh hersh shefrin and workshop participants at minnesota finance bag lunch 2003 wharton conference household financial decision making and portfolio choice and 2003 summer meetings of econometric society i would like to thank cam harvey the editor and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments and suggestions a special thanks to jack kareken for comments and editorial help on an earlier draft i am grateful to donna zerwitz for editorial assistance the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system all errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author address correspondence to valery polkovnichenko finance 3 122 csom 319 19 th

can union labor ever cost less this paper examines the effect of unions on efficiency by estimating cost function systems over three different sets of construction projects the results show that union contractors have greater economies of scale this gives them a cost advantage in large commercial office buildings but in school and hospital construction nonunion contractors have lower costs at all output levels despite the cost differences profits for nonunion contractors in school and hospital construction are no higher than those for union contractors because the burden of higher union costs is shifted to buyers

farm size tenure and economic efficiency in a sample of illinois grain farms apparently teague has not reviewed all of the literature for examining relative efficiency in the early work of lau and yotopoulos ly differences in economic efficiency are tested by incorporating only a dummy variable in the profit function to quantify differences associated with particular groups teague implicitly argues that only this should have been done as evidenced by the assertion that equations 2 and 3 are redundant in an extension of this early work yotopoulos and lau yl expand their conceptual framework to permit the assessment of relative technical and pricing efficiency as well as overall economic efficiency this latter framework is utilized by garcia sonka and yoo under this formulation the profit functions of the two firms or groups under analysis differ by a constant factor which is a function of technical and pricing efficiency in addition the demand equations may differ across groups by constant factors which are a function of pricing efficiency similar formulations also are presented in trosper o connor and hammonds and khan and maki perhaps teague s difficulty arises from either a misunderstanding of the methodology or an unfamiliarity with the approach and its standard notation in the former case the methodology permits tests for the relative efficiency pricing and economic without imposing it that is actual uop and demand functions can be derived based on behavioral relationships differences in actual functions permit an assessment of relative efficiency in the latter producers respond to effective prices profits and demand equations are derived based on these effective prices not actual prices the p s in garcia sonka and yoo can be shown to represent an underlying structure that permits differences in efficiency between the groups based on effective prices to understand the logic behind this formulation consider the concept of relative efficiency developed by yl this approach begins with the notion that given comparable endowments identical technology and normalized input prices the actual profits of two firms should be identical if they both maximize profits to the extent that one is more price efficient or technically more efficient than the other the normalized profits will differ even for the same normalized input prices and endowments of fixed inputs the actual normalized profit functions will then be different consider the case of the production functions of two firms 4 y aif x zi and r2 a2f x2 z2 where the x s and z s are variable and fixed inputs respectively a1 and a2 are scalar technical efficiency parameters and the superscripts represent the two firms the marginal conditions can be represented by

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

why do so few hold stocks the authors investigate why 75 percent of u s households do not hold stocks despite the equity premium and predictions of expected utility models the question is relevant for privatization asset pricing and tax progressivity issues they show that risk aversion per se heterogeneity of beliefs habit persistence time nonseparability and quantity constraints on borrowing do not account for the phenomenon a wedge between borrowing and lending rates and minimum investment requirements are plausible but empirically weak factors more promising explanations are inertia and departures from expected utility maximization there is also qualified support for nondiversifiable income risk as a contributing factor copyright 1995 by royal economic society

gender differences in risk aversion and expected retirement benefits women are generally considered more risk averse than men controlling for age income and education this study examined the impact of gender on the superannuation retirement fund risk preferences of staff in the australian university sector the findings suggest that women choose more conservative investment strategies than men and that lower income which affects the amount members contribute to their superannuation funds is the primary contributor to the lower projected retirement benefits of women providing members with a choice among risk levels in their retirement investments should significantly benefit male and female retirees

examining risk preferences under high monetary incentives experimental evidence from the people s republic of china several experimental sessions were conducted to elicit certainty equivalents for a sequence of lotteries involving real monetary outcomes the opportunity to conduct sessions in the people s republic of china afforded the ability to offer very large monetary incentives relative to subjects living costs in the highest payoff condition subjects earned three times their normal monthly revenue in the course of a two hour experiment results indicate a statistically significant impact of the level of monetary incentives on revealed risk preferences however even under extreme monetary incentives subjects demanded amounts well in excess of expected value for low probability gain prospects copyright 1992 by american economic association

a simple preference foundation of cumulative prospect theory with power utility most empirical studies of rank dependent utility and cumulative prospect theory have assumed power utility functions both for gains and for losses as it turns out a remarkably simple preference foundation is possible for such models tail independence a weakening of comonotonic independence which underlies all rank dependent models together with constant proportional risk aversion suffice in the presence of common assumptions weak ordering continuity and first stochastic dominance to imply these models thus sign dependence the different treatment of gains and losses and the separation of decision weights and utility are obtained free of charge

all their eggs in one basket portfolio diversification of us households abstract this paper uses data from the survey of consumer finances to assess how well mean variance efficiency describes the portfolio diversification of us households it does not seem to work well the median stockholder owns a single publicly traded stock often in the company where he works looking at a sample of high income households who accounted for one third of all publicly traded stock the median holding is only ten stocks indirect stock ownership through mutual funds defined contribution pension plans ira s and trust funds is shown to have little power in explaining this poor diversification

on the use and misuse of profit functions for measuring the price responsiveness of peasant farmers a comment the standard profit function approach has been applied successfully in a number of ldcs to measure the price responsiveness of peasant farmers yet various problems afflict this approach including but not restricted to the existence of non competitive market structures zero valued observations exclusion of relevant variables lack of participation in output and or input markets and endogeneity of input and or output prices the impact of these problems on estimation results however can be minimised through modifications and adaptations of the standard approach better specification of the underlying technology and the use of selected functional forms

scottish banking before 1845 a model for laissez faire during the free banking era in eighteenth and early nineteenth century scotland there were a number of legal restrictions affecting the evolution of the system scottish banking was characterized by restrictions on small denomination and interest bearing notes there were also restrictions inhibiting the development of capital markets and entry into banking furthermore the bank of england operated as a shadow central bank for the scottish system these considerations call into question the use of the scottish banking experience as the appropriate model for laissez faire and as evidence against the legal restrictions theory of money and the new monetary economics copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

first order risk aversion and the equity premium puzzle abstract this paper integrates yaari s dual theory of choice under uncertainty into a multiperiod context and examines its implications for the equity premium puzzle an important property of these preferences is that of first order risk aversion which implies in our model that the risk premium for a small gamble is proportional to the standard deviation rather than the variance since the standard deviation of the growth rate in aggregate consumption is considerably larger than its variance the model can generate both a small risk free rate and a moderate equity premium