Heterogeneity and Asset Prices: A Different Approach

61 Pages Posted: 13 Dec 2019

See all articles by Nicolae Garleanu

Nicolae Garleanu

University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Stavros Panageas

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Finance Area; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: May 27, 2019

Abstract

We develop a tractable asset-pricing framework characterized by imperfect risk sharing among cohorts, who experience different levels of integrated life-time endowments. While all asset-pricing implications stem from the heterogeneity of consumption among investors, cross-sectional measures of inequality are non-volatile, only weakly related to asset prices, and far more persistent than the price-to-dividend ratio. We show how to identify a marginal agent’s consumption growth in this framework by utilizing cross-sectional information. Our proposed notion of marginal-agent consumption growth exhibits different and more volatile low-frequency variation than the aggregate consumption growth per capita, which is normally used in representative agent models. These low frequency movements in our measure of marginal agent consumption growth can explain a large portion of the low frequency movements in real interest rates and, when combined with recursive preferences, can account quantitatively for the stylized asset-pricing facts (high market price of risk, equity premium, volatility, and return predictability).

Keywords: asset pricing, heterogeneity, imperfect risk sharing, overlapping generations

JEL Classification: G01, G12

Suggested Citation

Garleanu, Nicolae Bogdan and Panageas, Stavros, Heterogeneity and Asset Prices: A Different Approach (May 27, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3494565 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3494565

Nicolae Bogdan Garleanu

University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business ( email )

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HOME PAGE: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/garleanu

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

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Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ( email )

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United Kingdom

Stavros Panageas (Contact Author)

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - Finance Area ( email )

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

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