What drives equity market non-participation?

Jason C. Hsu

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2012, vol. 23, issue 1, 86-114

Abstract: This paper produces endogenous equity market non-participation in an economy with uninsurable labor income risk and heterogeneous skill levels. Prudence and impatience generate stationary household wealth levels that depend on income. Skill, and therefore labor income, heterogeneity leads to wealth heterogeneity, with high skill households accumulating high wealth and low skill households accumulating low wealth. A HARA class utility with subsistence consumption requirement generates decreasing RRA with respect to household wealth. Consequently, low skill households also have significantly higher local RRA. In addition low skill households have less human capital and therefore have lower diversification demand for stocks. Low wealth, high RRA and low diversification demand predicts that low skill households do not hold stocks in the face of a moderate ownership cost. In addition, the model predicts a humped lifecycle wealth accumulation pattern and a humped lifecycle stock allocation pattern. I also find that stockholders exhibit a greater aggregate willingness to supply risky capital during the expansion phase of a business cycle, despite the lower conditional equity premium.

Keywords: Equity market non-participation puzzle; Household portfolio choice; Equity premium puzzle; Low interest rate puzzle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062940811000568
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecofin:v:23:y:2012:i:1:p:86-114

DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2011.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi

More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().