IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v17y2004i3p879-914.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Wealth, Information Acquisition, and Portfolio Choice

Author

Listed:
  • Joël Peress

Abstract

I solve (with an approximation) a Grossman-Stiglitz economy under general preferences, thus allowing for wealth effects. Because information generates increasing returns, decreasing absolute risk aversion, in conjunction with the availability of costly information, is sufficient to explain why wealthier households invest a larger fraction of their wealth in risky assets. One no longer needs to resort to decreasing relative risk aversion, an empirically questionable assumption. Furthermore, I show how to distinguish empirically between these two explanations. Finally, I find that the availability of costly information exacerbates wealth inequalities. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Joël Peress, 2004. "Wealth, Information Acquisition, and Portfolio Choice," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(3), pages 879-914.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:17:y:2004:i:3:p:879-914
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhg056
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:17:y:2004:i:3:p:879-914. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.