I show that the pricing of a broad class of long-dated assets is driven by the possibility of extraordinarily bad news. This result does not depend on any assumptions about the existence of disasters, nor does it apply only to assets that hedge bad outcomes; indeed, it applies even to long-dated...

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions using comprehensive disaggregated Swedish data. We consider two main sources of inefficiency: underdiversification ("down") and nonparticipation in risky asset markets ("out"). While a few households are very poorly...