Information Immobility and the Home Bias Puzzle

Many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can. But why doesn't global information access eliminate this asymmetry? We model investors, endowed with a small home information advantage, who choose what information to learn before they invest. Surprisingly, even when home investors can learn what foreigners know, they choose not to: Investors profit more from knowing information others do not know. Learning amplifies information asymmetry. The model matches patterns of local and industry bias, foreign investments, portfolio out-performance and asset prices. Finally, we propose new avenues for empirical research.

A Theory of Housing Collateral, Consumption Insurance and Risk Premia

In a model with housing collateral, a decrease in house prices reduces the collateral value of housing, increases household exposure to idiosyncratic risk, and increases the conditional market price of risk. This collateral mechanism can quantitatively replicate the conditional and the cross-sectional variation in risk premia on stocks for reasonable parameter values. The increase of the conditional equity premium and Sharpe ratio when collateral is scarce in the model matches the increase observed in US data. The model also generates a return spread of value firms over growth firms of the magnitude observed in the data, because the term structure of consumption strip risk premia is downward sloping.

Can Housing Collateral Explain Long-Run Swings in Asset Returns?

To explain the low-frequency variation in US equity and debt returns in the 20th century, we solve an equilibrium model in which households face housing collateral constraints. An increase in the ratio of housing to human wealth loosens these borrowing constraintsthus allowing for more risk sharing. The rate of return that households require for holding equity decreases as a result. Feeding the historical time series of US housing collateral into the model replicates four features of long-run asset returns. (1) It produces a fifteen percent equity premium during the 1930s and a slow decline of the equity premium from eleven percent in the 1960s to four percent in 2003. (2) It generates large unexpected capital gains for equity holders, especially in the 1990s. (3) The risk-free rate and the housing collateral ratio are strongly positively correlated at low frequencies. (4) The model mimics the slow decline in the volatility of stock returns and the riskless interest rate.

Housing Collateral, Consumption Insurance and Risk Premia: an Empirical Perspective

In a model with housing collateral, the ratio of housing wealth to human wealth shifts the conditional disibution of asset prices and consumption growth. A decrease in house prices reduces the collateral value of housing, increases household exposure to idiosyncratic risk, and increases the conditional market price of risk. Using aggregate data for the US, we find that a decrease in the ratio of housing wealth to human wealth predicts higher returns on stocks. Conditional on this ratio, the covariance of returns with aggregate risk factors explains eighty percent of the cross-sectional variation in annual size and book-to-market portfolio returns

Housing Collateral, Consumption Insurance and Risk Premia: An Empirical Perpective

In a model with housing collateral, the ratio of housing wealth to human wealth shifts the conditional distribution of asset prices and consumption growth. A decrease in house prices reduces the collateral value of housing, increases household exposure to idiosyncratic risk, and increases the conditional market price of risk. Using aggregate data for the US, we find that a decrease in the ratio of housing wealth to human wealth predicts higher returns on stocks. Conditional on this ratio, the covariance of returns with aggregate risk factors explains eighty percent of the cross-sectional variation in annual size and book-to-market portfolio returns. A data appendix for this paper is available .

The Returns on Human Capital: Good News on Wall Street is Bad News on Main Street

We use a standard single-agent model to conduct a simple consumption growth accounting exercise. Consumption growth is driven by news about current and expected future returns on the market portfolio. The market portfolio includes financial and human wealth. We impute the residual of consumption growth innovations that cannot be attributed to either news about financial asset returns or future labor income growth to news about expected future returns on human wealth, and we back out the implied human wealth and market return process. This accounting procedure only depends on the agent's willingness to substitute consumption over time, not her consumption risk preferences. We find that innovations in current and future human wealth returns are negatively correlated with innovations in current and future financial asset returns, regardless of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The evidence from the cross-section of stock returns suggests that the market return we back out of aggregate consumption innovations is a better measure of market risk than the return on the stock market.

Monetary Policy in an Equilibrium Portfolio Balance Model

Portfolio balance, sterilized foreign exchange intervention

The Joy of Giving or Assisted Living? Using Strategic Surveys to Separate Bequest and Precautionary Motives

Strong bequest motives can explain low retirement spending, but so equally can strong precautionary motives. Given this identification problem, the recent tradition has been largely to ignore bequest motives. We develop a rich model of spending in retirement that allows for both motives, and introduce a "Medicaid aversion" parameter that plays a key role in determining precautionary savings. We implement a "strategic" survey to resolve the identification problem between bequest and precautionary motives. We find that strong bequest motives are too prevalent to be ignored. Moreover, Medicaid aversion is widespread, and helps explain the low spending of many middle class retirees

How Much Does Household Collateral Constrain Regional Risk Sharing?

We construct a new data set of consumption and income data for the largest US metropolitan areas, and we show that the covariance of regional consumption and income growth varies over time and in the cross-section. In times and regions where collateral is scarce, regional consumption growth is about twice as sensitive to income growth. Household-level borrowing frictions can explain this new stylized fact. When the value of housing relative to human wealth falls, loan collateral shrinks, borrowing (risk-sharing) declines, and the sensitivity of consumption to income increases. Our model aggregates heterogeneous, borrowing-constrained households into regions characterized by a common housing market. The resulting regional consumption patterns quantitatively match those in the data.

INSIDE INFORMATION AND THE OWN COMPANY STOCK PUZZLE

U.S. investors allocate 30-40% of their financial asset portfolio in the stock of the company stock they work for. Such a portfolio flies in the face of standard portfolio theory, which prescribes that an investor should hold less of a financial asset that is positively correlated with her undiversified labor income. Nevertheless, we propose a rational explanation that prescribes a long position in own company stock. Precisely because the own company stock is positively correlated with the investor's labor income, any information the investor learns about her earnings is a partial information advantage in her own company stock. When confronted with a choice of what information to acquire, employees may choose to learn about their own firm. Learning lowers the employee's risk of holding own-firm equity, which raises its risk-adjusted returns and makes a long position optimal