In a setting with information asymmetry and a tradable value-weighted market index, ambiguity averse investors hold undiversified portfolios, and assets have non-zero alphas. But when a passive fund offers the risk-adjusted market portfolio (RAMP) whose weights depend on information precisions...

We study the equilibrium implications of a multi-asset economy in which asset managers are subject to different benchmarks, and demonstrate how heterogeneous benchmarking generates a mechanism through which fundamental shocks propagate across assets. Fluctuations in asset managers' capital...

We construct a parsimonious set of equity factors by sorting stocks according to the sociodemographic characteristics of the individual investors who own them. The analysis uses administrative data on the stockholdings of Norwegian investors in 1997-2018. Consistent with financial theory, a...

Behavioral finance tries to make sense of financial data using models that are based on psychologically accurate assumptions about people's beliefs, preferences, and cognitive limits. I review behavioral finance approaches to understanding asset prices and trading volume, with particular...

This chapter discusses computational methods for approximating portfolio and asset pricing problems. Formulation of these problems is usually specified along with components, preferences, payoffs, etc., that are analytic functions. This implies that the solutions to these problems acquire this...

We contrast two different asset pricing models, where the pricing kernel either (i) increases in the volatility dimension, reflecting investors' aversion to volatility, or (ii) could be non-monotonic in volatility, reflecting heterogeneity in investors' beliefs. The two models yield opposite...

This paper considers a general-equilibrium model with loss-aversion in consumption and heterogeneity: there is a continuum of agents, with s-shaped utility, who differ in the time-varying reference level of consumption. Heterogeneity in the reference level is crucial for the existence of the...

This paper analyzes the link between herd behavior and asset prices in a multi-good pure-exchange economy where investors' preferences evolve over time in response to the consumption decisions of other investors. More precisely, the rule of updating preferences incorporates a bandwagon effect,...

Investors show different behaviour in falling markets and in rising markets. This paper demonstrates that the beta of individual stocks varies across the entire return distribution and that the variation depends on the frequency of the returns. While there is a symmetric u-shape increase for...

This note investigates the impact of investors' memory limitations on stock-market prices. I consider a simple asset-pricing model in which investors allocate limited cognitive resources to retrieve information from memory and to learn about the data generating process of multiple assets. I show...