This paper proposes a test for the cost-based explanation of non-participation, by estimating a lower bound to the forgone gains of incomplete portfolios; these are in turn a lower bound to the costs that could rationalize non-participation in financial markets: high bounds would imply...

This paper builds a unifying framework based on the theory of intertemporal consumption choices that brings together the limited participation-based explanation of the C-CAPM poor empirical performance and the transaction costs-based explanation of incomplete portfolios. Using the implications...

This paper analyzes the Risk Appetite Index (RAI), a measure of investors� risk aversion proposed by Kumar and Persaud (2001, 2002). We show that the RAI distinguishes between risk and risk aversion only under theoretically restrictive assumptions on the distribution of returns and the...

This paper focuses on the issue of limited financial market participation and determines a lower bound on the level of fixed transaction costs that are required to reconcile observed portfolio choices with asset returns within an isoelastic utility framework. The bound is determined from the set...