Financial Innovation and Asset Price Volatility

Felix Kubler and Karl Schmedders

American Economic Review, 2012, vol. 102, issue 3, 147-51

Abstract: We compare asset prices in an overlapping generations model for incomplete and complete markets. Individuals within a generational cohort have heterogeneous beliefs about future states of the economy and thus would like to make bets against each other. In the incomplete-markets economy, agents cannot make such bets. Asset price volatility is very small. The situation changes dramatically when markets are completed through financial innovations as the set of available securities now allows agents with different beliefs to place bets against each other. Wealth shifts across agents and generations. Such changes in the wealth distribution lead to substantial asset price volatility.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.102.3.147 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:102:y:2012:i:3:p:147-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().