IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/4068.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Is There Evidence of Pessimism and Doubt in Subjective Distributions? A Comment on Abel

Author

Listed:
  • Söderlind, Paul
  • Giordani, Paolo

Abstract

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the risk-free rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are, in fact, pessimistic, but show marked overconfidence rather than doubt. Whether this implies that overconfidence should be built into Abel?s model depends on how the empirically heterogeneous subjective distributions are mapped into the distribution of a fictitious representative agent. We work out the form of this mapping in an Arrow-Debreu economy and show that the equity premium increases with the dispersion of beliefs. We then estimate this aggregate distribution and find little evidence of either overconfidence or doubt.

Suggested Citation

  • Söderlind, Paul & Giordani, Paolo, 2003. "Is There Evidence of Pessimism and Doubt in Subjective Distributions? A Comment on Abel," CEPR Discussion Papers 4068, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:4068
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP4068
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

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

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Giordani, Paolo & Soderlind, Paul, 2003. "Inflation forecast uncertainty," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 47(6), pages 1037-1059, December.
    2. Shlomo Benartzi & Richard H. Thaler, 1995. "Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 73-92.
    3. Aaron Tornell, 2000. "Robust-H-infinity Forecasting and Asset Pricing Anomalies," NBER Working Papers 7753, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Detemple Jerome & Murthy Shashidhar, 1994. "Intertemporal Asset Pricing with Heterogeneous Beliefs," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 294-320, April.
    5. Christoffersen, Peter F, 1998. "Evaluating Interval Forecasts," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 841-862, November.
    6. Matthew Rabin, 1998. "Psychology and Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 36(1), pages 11-46, March.
    7. David Hirshleifer, 2001. "Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1533-1597, August.
    8. Abel, Andrew B., 2002. "An exploration of the effects of pessimism and doubt on asset returns," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 26(7-8), pages 1075-1092, July.
    9. Varian, Hal R, 1985. "Divergence of Opinion in Complete Markets: A Note," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(1), pages 309-317, March.
    10. Lucas, Robert E, Jr, 1978. "Asset Prices in an Exchange Economy," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(6), pages 1429-1445, November.
    11. Louis K. C. Chan & Jason Karceski & Josef Lakonishok, 2003. "The Level and Persistence of Growth Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(2), pages 643-684, April.
    12. Rubinstein, Mark, 1974. "An aggregation theorem for securities markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 1(3), pages 225-244, September.
    13. Nicholas Barberis & Ming Huang & Tano Santos, 2001. "Prospect Theory and Asset Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(1), pages 1-53.
    14. Richard H. Thaler, 2000. "From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(1), pages 133-141, Winter.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Benjamin E. Hermalin & Michael S. Weisbach, 2012. "Information Disclosure and Corporate Governance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(1), pages 195-234, February.
    2. Engelberg, Joseph & Manski, Charles F. & Williams, Jared, 2009. "Comparing the Point Predictions and Subjective Probability Distributions of Professional Forecasters," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27, pages 30-41.
    3. Jouini, E. & Napp, C., 2008. "On Abel's concept of doubt and pessimism," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(11), pages 3682-3694, November.
    4. Rydqvist, Kristian, 2010. "Tax Arbitrage with Risk and Effort Aversion - Swedish Lottery Bonds 1970-1990," SIFR Research Report Series 70, Institute for Financial Research.
    5. Jouini, Elyes & Napp, Clotilde, 2006. "Heterogeneous beliefs and asset pricing in discrete time: An analysis of pessimism and doubt," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 30(7), pages 1233-1260, July.
    6. Verma, Rahul & Soydemir, Gökçe, 2009. "The impact of individual and institutional investor sentiment on the market price of risk," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 1129-1145, August.
    7. Dreber, Anna & Rand, David G. & Garcia, Justin R. & Wernerfelt, Nils & Lum, J. Koji & Zeckhauser, Richard, 2010. "Dopamine and Risk Preferences in Different Domains," Working Paper Series rwp10-012, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    8. Olivier Armantier & Nicolas Treich, 2006. "Overbidding in Independant Private-Values Auctions and Misperception of Probabilities," CIRANO Working Papers 2006s-15, CIRANO.
    9. repec:dau:papers:123456789/198 is not listed on IDEAS

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Giordani, Paolo & Soderlind, Paul, 2006. "Is there evidence of pessimism and doubt in subjective distributions? Implications for the equity premium puzzle," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 30(6), pages 1027-1043, June.
    2. Söderlind, Paul, 2009. "The C-CAPM without ex post data," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 721-729, December.
    3. Xue-Zhong He & Lei Shi, 2010. "Differences in Opinion and Risk Premium," Research Paper Series 271, Quantitative Finance Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney.
    4. Lovric, M. & Kaymak, U. & Spronk, J., 2008. "A Conceptual Model of Investor Behavior," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2008-030-F&A, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    5. Christian Gollier, 2007. "Whom should we believe? Aggregation of heterogeneous beliefs," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 35(2), pages 107-127, October.
    6. repec:zbw:bofrdp:037 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Li, Tao, 2007. "Heterogeneous beliefs, asset prices, and volatility in a pure exchange economy," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 1697-1727, May.
    8. Daniel, Kent & Hirshleifer, David & Teoh, Siew Hong, 2002. "Investor psychology in capital markets: evidence and policy implications," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 139-209, January.
    9. Calvet, Laurent-Emmanuel & Grandmont, Jean-Michel & Lemaire, Isabelle, 2018. "Aggregation of heterogenous beliefs, asset pricing, and risk sharing in complete financial markets," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 117-146.
    10. Berkelaar, Arjan & Kouwenberg, Roy, 2009. "From boom 'til bust: How loss aversion affects asset prices," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(6), pages 1005-1013, June.
    11. Ambrocio, Gene, 2017. "The real effects of overconfidence and fundamental uncertainty shocks," Research Discussion Papers 37/2017, Bank of Finland.
    12. Evan W. Anderson & Eric Ghysels & Jennifer L. Juergens, 2005. "Do Heterogeneous Beliefs Matter for Asset Pricing?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 18(3), pages 875-924.
    13. Söderlind, Paul, 2009. "Why disagreement may not matter (much) for asset prices," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 73-82, June.
    14. Abbigail J. Chiodo & Massimo Guidolin & Michael T. Owyang & Makoto Shimoji, 2003. "Subjective probabilities: psychological evidence and economic applications," Working Papers 2003-009, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    15. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2017_037 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Nicholas Barberis & Ming Huang & Tano Santos, "undated". "Prospect Theory and Asset Prices," CRSP working papers 494, Center for Research in Security Prices, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.
    17. Xue‐Zhong He & Lei Shi, 2012. "Boundedly rational equilibrium and risk premium," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 52(1), pages 71-93, March.
    18. Stracca, Livio, 2004. "Behavioral finance and asset prices: Where do we stand?," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 373-405, June.
    19. Siddiqi, Hammad, 2015. "Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic: A Unified Explanation for Equity Puzzles," MPRA Paper 68729, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Stefano DellaVigna, 2009. "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(2), pages 315-372, June.
    21. Guidolin, Massimo & Timmermann, Allan, 2007. "Properties of equilibrium asset prices under alternative learning schemes," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 31(1), pages 161-217, January.
    22. Alexander Zimper, 2023. "Belief aggregation for representative agent models," International Journal of Economic Theory, The International Society for Economic Theory, vol. 19(2), pages 309-342, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    C42; Equity premium; Risk-free rate; Aggregation of beliefs; Survey of professional forecasters; Livingston survey;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    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:cpr:ceprdp:4068. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    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.