Life-Cycle Portfolio Choice, the Wealth Distribution and Asset Prices

Karl Schmedders and Felix Kubler

No 536, 2012 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: In this paper we examine the volatility of asset returns in a canonical stochastic overlapping generations economy with sequentially complete markets. We show that movements in the in- tergenerational wealth distribution strongly affect asset prices since older generations have a lower propensity to save than younger generations. We investigate effects of aggregate shocks on the wealth distribution and show that they are generally small if agents have identical be- liefs. Differences in opinion, however, can lead to large movements in the wealth distribution even when aggregate shocks are absent. The interplay of belief heterogeneity and life-cycle investments leads to considerable changes in the wealth distribution which in turn result in substantial asset price volatility. In fact, the model generates realistic second moments of asset returns.

Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2012/paper_536.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Life-Cycle Portfolio Choice, the Wealth Distribution and Asset Prices (2010)
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:red:sed012:536

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2012 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann (chuichuiche@gmail.com).