After taking into account biases induced by infrequent trading and selection, it is unlikely that illiquid asset classes have higher risk-adjusted returns than traditional liquid stock and bond markets. On the other hand, there are significant illiquidity premiums within asset classes. Portfolio...

We show in a fairly general setting of a buyer and seller with the same preferences trading two related assets so as to share volatility risk that illiquidity and virtually all impediments to trade cannot be priced. This is because the buying and selling counterparties must both be optimizing....

Using trade-level data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange, we document an asymmetric pattern of liquidity provision by individual investors who serve as de facto market makers. Specifically, individual investors, on average, provide more liquidity during market downturns. We further investigate the...

I analyze welfare properties of mutual funds in the Diamond-Dybvig model with two sources of aggregate risk: undiversifiable interest rate risk and shocks to aggregate liquidity demand. Mutual funds are inefficient when the economy faces undiversifiable interest rate risk. However, if only...

I revisit the Diamond-Dybvig model of liquidity insurance in the presence of hidden trades. The key result is that in this environment deposit-taking banks are not necessary for the efficient provision of liquidity. Mutual funds are constrained efficient when supplemented with the same...

This paper studies liquidity insurance by financial intermediaries when agents can make unobservable side trades. Closed-end mutual funds of Jacklin (1987) achieve constrained efficiency when regulated appropriately, equilibrium is unique, and there are no financial panics. In an economy with...

We examine the problem of an investor who trades in a market with unobservable regime shifts. The investor learns from past prices and is subject to transaction costs. Our model generates significantly larger liquidity premia compared to a benchmark model with observable market shifts. The...

We generate large liquidity premia endogenously from the interaction of transaction costs with convexity in preferences, offering a novel explanation for a longstanding puzzle. We derive this result from the dynamic portfolio problem of mutual fund managers facing either convex flows or year-end...

The vast majority of household wealth in the U.S. is held in illiquid assets, primarily housing, making households vulnerable to unexpected income shocks. To rationalize this preference for illiquidity, we build a life-cycle model where households are tempted to consume their liquid wealth but...

A wide body of empirical evidence, based on randomized experiments, finds that 20-40 percent of fiscal stimulus payments (e.g. tax rebates) are spent on non-durable household consumption in the quarter that they are received. We develop a structural economic model to interpret this evidence. Our...