In this paper, we examine if the diversification decisions of individual investors influence asset prices. First, we show that a vast majority of individual investors in our sample are under-diversified and the unexpectedly high idiosyncratic risk in their portfolios results in a welfare loss -...

Standard Fama-French and Carhart models produce economically and statistically significant nonzero alphas even for passive benchmark indices such as the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. We find that these alphas primarily arise from the disproportionate weight the Fama-French factors place on small...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...

We provide methods of decomposing the variance of world national incomes into components in such a way as to indicate the most important risk-sharing opportunities, and, therefore, the most important missing international risk markets to establish. One method uses a total variance reduction...

We introduce and justify a taxonomy for the structure of markets and minimal institutions which appear in constructing minimally complex trading structures to perform the functions of price formation, settlement and payments. Each structure is presented as a playable strategic market game and is...

We propose a dynamic equilibrium model of asset prices and trading volume with heterogeneous agents fixed transactions costs. We show that even small fixed costs can give rise to large "no-trade" regions for each agent's optimal trading policy and a significant illiquidity discount in asset...

This paper presents a model in which investors cannot remain in the market to trade at all times. As a result, they have an incentive to set up trading firms or financial market intermediaries (FMI's) to take over their portfolio while they engage in other activities. Previous research has...

We analyze the impact of price trends on trading decisions of more than 40,000 households with accounts at a major discount brokerage house and find that buying and selling decisions of investors in our sample are influenced by short-term (less than 3 months) price trends. We examine investor...

Substantial progress has been made in extending the Black-Scholes model to incorporate such features as stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rates and jumps.On the empirical front, however, it is not yet known whether and by how much each generalized feature will improve option pricing and...