Learning and Stock Market Participation

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of trading constraints on market participation when agents learn about their investment opportunities. The possibility of facing binding constraints in the future creates a feedback that can keep agents out of the market even if the risk premium is high. This effect arises with learning because the changes in investment opportunities are correlated with future realized outcomes: an agent will have a poor investment opportunity set precisely in those future states where her marginal utility is high. Non-participation arises also in an equilibrium model where agents resolve uncertainty about the cash flow covariance between tradable and non-tradable assets. These results suggest that learning and short-sale constraints can simultaneously generate limited participation, higher risk premium, and insignificant contemporaneous correlation between the stock return and the income of those who do not participate in the stock market. We conclude that a standard intertemporal hedging motive, generated by (i) learning about the parameters of the economy or by (ii) changes in the labor income dynamics, may account for agents' seemingly puzzling nonparticipation decisions without relying on non-standard preferences.

Keywords: Parameter uncertainty, learning, limited stock market participation

JEL Classification: G11