Download This PaperThe Implications of Heterogeneity and Inequality for Asset Pricing
73 Pages Posted: 13 Apr 2020 Last revised: 16 Mar 2025
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The Implications of Heterogeneity and Inequality for Asset Pricing
Date Written: April 2020
Abstract
Does heterogeneity matter for asset pricing and in particular for risk premiums? Starting with an irrelevance result, I classify the literature into two groups of papers taking different routes to link investor heterogeneity and risk premiums. The first group contains models of investors who differ in terms of their preferences, beliefs, or access to markets. Despite their differences, these models have similar implications, and can be analyzed in a unified way. The second group of papers consists of models where investors experience uninsurable income shocks. The goal of this survey is to provide one unified framework to better understand this large literature, and especially to reconcile several of the seemingly inconsistent results found in some seminal papers.
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