The Impact of Keeping up with the Joneses Behavior on Asset Prices and Portfolio Choice

This paper studies the asset pricing and portfolio choice implications of keeping up with the Joneses preferences. In terms of portfolio choice, we provide sufficient conditions on the utility function under which no portfolio bias can arise across agents in equilibrium. Regarding asset prices, we find that under Joneses behavior asset prices are a function of the economy's aggregate consumption, the agents preference parameters, the wealth endowment distribution and the weighting across agents in the Joneses definition. We present necessary and sufficient conditions such that equilibrium prices are only a function of aggregate wealth. Non-financial, non-diversifiable income is introduced in the model. In the presence of Joneses behavior, an under-diversified equilibrium emerges where investors will bias their portfolios towards the financial assets that better hedge their exposure to the non-financial income risk