This paper analyzes how combining firms into either groups or conglomerates affects their credit standing, as measured by their de- fault probabilities, recovery rates and credit spreads. Each combina- tion offers protection against default to its affiliates, and issues debt to optimize the...

Household portfolios include risky bonds, beyond stocks, and respond to permanent labour income shocks. This paper brings these features into a life-cycle setting, and shows that optimal stock investment is constant or increasing in age before retirement for realistic parameter combinations. The...

The paper explores the fit properties of a class of multivariate Lévy processes, which are characterized as time-changed correlated Brownian motions. The time-change has a common and an idiosyncratic component, to re ect the properties of trade, which it represents. The resulting process may...

This paper examines the ex-post performance of optimal portfolios with predictable returns, when the investor horizon ranges from one month to ten years. Due to the investor's ability to anticipate shifts from bull to bear markets, predictability involves the risk premium, volatility and...

Recent research [e.g., DeMiguel, Garlappi and Uppal, (2009a), Rev. Fin. Studies] has cast doubts on the out-of-sample performance of optimizing portfolio strategies relative to a naive, equally-weighted ones. However, most of the existing results concern the simple case in which an investor has...

Do equity markets help diversifying away industry-related labor income risk? This paper reconsiders the hedging role of stock markets by focusing on international equity diversification, rather than domestic asset allocation, and on industry wage, rather than individual labor income. We test for...

This paper develops a theory of corporate ownership and leverage of multi- ple firms under a tax-bankruptcy trade-off, allowing for internal bailouts. It then questions whether tax policy contributes to the default of the resulting complex or- ganization. Absent other taxes and non-financial...

This paper constructs a class of multivariate Gaussian marked Poisson processes to model asset returns. The model proposed accommodates the cross section properties of trades, allows for returns to be correlated conditional on trading activity, and preserves the economic intuition of normality...

This paper explores the relationship between optimal leverage and credit risk under ownership links. It develops a structural model of a parent and a subsidiary, which issues debt in its own name under a guarantee by the parent. We find that zero leverage can be optimal for the guarantor, while...

A definition of set-wise differentiability for set functions is given through refining the partitions of sets. Such a construction is closely related to the one proposed by Rosenmuller (1977) as well as that studied by Epstein (1999) and Epstein and Marinacci (2001). We present several classes...