Hedging, Familiarity and Portfolio Choice

55 Pages Posted: 29 Mar 2005

See all articles by Massimo Massa

Massimo Massa

INSEAD - Finance

Andrei Simonov

Michigan State University - Eli Broad Graduate School of Management; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: December 2004

Abstract

We exploit the restrictions of intertemporal portfolio choice in the presence of non-financial income risk to design and implement tests of hedging that use the information contained in the actual portfolio of the investor. We use a unique dataset of Swedish investors with information broken down at the investor level and into various components of wealth, investor income, tax positions and investor demographic characteristics. Portfolio holdings are identified at the stock level. We show that investors do not engage in hedging, but invest in stocks closely related to their non-financial income. We explain this with familiarity, that is, the tendency to concentrate holdings in stocks to which the investor is geographically or professionally close or that he has held for a long period. We show that familiarity is not a behavioral bias, but is information-driven. Familiarity-based investment allows investors to earn higher returns than they would have otherwise earned if they had hedged.

Keywords: Asset pricing, portfolio decision, hedging

JEL Classification: G11, G14

Suggested Citation

Massa, Massimo and Simonov, Andrei, Hedging, Familiarity and Portfolio Choice (December 2004). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=694381

Massimo Massa (Contact Author)

INSEAD - Finance ( email )

Boulevard de Constance
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+33 1 6072 4045 (Fax)

Andrei Simonov

Michigan State University - Eli Broad Graduate School of Management ( email )

645 N. Shaw Lane, 321 Eppley Center
East Lansing, MI 48824-1122
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www.andreisimonov.com

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ( email )

London
United Kingdom

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