Introducing heterogeneity of beliefs across different agents builds a link between wealth distribution and the equity premium. We demonstrate that an economy populated only by risk neutral agents may nonetheless display a strictly positive equity premium. We then place our notion of belief heterogeneity within the popular representative agent construct. We show that any level of belief heterogeneity in the multi agent economy can be mapped into some specific degree of risk aversion of the representative agent economy that keeps equilibrium prices constant. A fully dynamic model follows. Finally, we suggest an explanation for the recent behavior of the equity premium: a story of "heterogeneous optimism" versus "homogeneous pessimism" is presented.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Collegio Carlo Alberto in its series Carlo Alberto Notebooks with number
67.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution D51 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Exchange and Production Economies D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Barberis, Nicholas & Thaler, Richard, 2003.
"A survey of behavioral finance,"
Handbook of the Economics of Finance,
in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 18, pages 1053-1128
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Ravi Jagannathan & Ellen R. McGrattan & Anna Scherbina, 2001.
"The Declining U.S. Equity Premium,"
NBER Working Papers
8172, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".