SPECIFICATION AND ECONOMETRIC IMPROVEMENTS IN REGIONAL PORTFOLIO DIVERSIFICATION ANALYSIS

We develop an alternative specification of the regional portfolio diversification problem that explicitly incorporates important information on regional economic structure and avoids certain inconsistencies in the traditional specification with respect to what constitutes the choice set. We also implement improved econometric procedures for estimating the required parameters and provide an empirical example using 1987 data for the Colorado economy to illustrate the potential differences in sectoral allocations obtained when applying our alternative approach versus the traditional one.