The Journal of Finance

The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.

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Income Risk and Portfolio Choice: An Empirical Study

Published: 03/13/2009   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01456.x

XIAOHONG ANGERER, POK‐SANG LAM

This paper investigates the relationship between portfolio choice and labor income risk in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. Permanent income risk (variability of shocks to income that have permanent effect) significantly reduces the share of risky assets in the household's portfolio, while transitory income risk (variability of shocks with no lasting effect) does not. This result provides strong evidence that households' portfolio choices respond to labor income risks in a manner consistent with economic theory.


Testing Volatility Restrictions on Intertemporal Marginal Rates of Substitution Implied by Euler Equations and Asset Returns

Published: 03/01/1994   |   DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.1994.tb04423.x

STEPHEN G. CECCHETTI, POK‐SANG LAM, NELSON C. MARK

The Euler equations derived from intertemporal asset pricing models, together with the unconditional moments of asset returns, imply a lower bound on the volatility of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution. This paper develops and implements statistical tests of these lower bound restrictions. While the availability of short time series of consumption data often undermines the ability of these tests to discriminate among different utility functions, we find that the restrictions implied by a number of widely studied financial data sets continue to pose quite a challenge to the current generation of intertemporal asset pricing theories.