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Young, Old, Conservative, and Bold: The Implications of Heterogeneity and Finite Lives for Asset Pricing

Journal of Political Economy 2015 123(3), 670-685
We study the implications of preference heterogeneity for asset pricing. We use recursive preferences in order to separate heterogeneity in risk aversion from heterogeneity in the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and an overlapping-generations framework to obtain a nondegenerate stationary equilibrium. We solve the model explicitly up to the solutions of ordinary differential equations and highlight the effects of overlapping generations and each dimension of preference heterogeneity on the market price of risk, interest rates, and the volatility of stock returns. We find that separating intertemporal elasticity of substitution and risk aversion heterogeneity can have a substantive impact on the model's (qualitative and quantitative) ability to address some key asset-pricing issues.

Financial Entanglement: A Theory of Incomplete Integration, Leverage, Crashes, and Contagion

American Economic Review 2015 105(7), 1979-2010
We propose a unified model of limited market integration, asset-price determination, leveraging, and contagion. Investors and firms are located on a circle, and access to markets involves participation costs that increase with distance. Due to a complementarity between participation and leverage decisions, the equilibrium may exhibit diverse leverage and participation choices across investors, although investors are ex ante identical. Small changes in market-access costs can cause a change in the type of equilibrium, leading to discontinuous price changes, deleveraging, and portfolio-flow reversals. Moreover, the market is subject to contagion—an adverse shock to investors in some locations affects prices everywhere.