We examine how insiders and firms trade when arbitrage is limited. When arbitrage is costly (proxied by high idiosyncratic risk), insiders and firms earn higher absolute returns on their trades (insider trading, share repurchases, and seasoned equity offerings) in the following year. Furthermore, they initiate their trades following greater past price movements in the preceding year. These resu...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

The finance literature documents the relation between labor income and the crosssection of stock returns. A possible explanation is the hedging of investors with relative wealth concerns who pay a premium for securities that help them to keep up with their peers. Relative wealth concerns imply a local effect and a negative risk premium associated with the risk factor, since investors are willin...

In a market with one safe and one risky asset, an investor with a long horizon, constant investment opportunities, and constant relative risk aversion trades with small proportional transaction costs. We derive explicit formulas for the optimal investment policy, its implied welfare, liquidity premium, and trading volume. At the first order, the liquidity premium equals the spread, times share ...

Though risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny, the long-run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles has ignored the full implications of their parameter specifications. Recursive utility implies that the temporal resolution of risk matters and a quantitative ass...

This paper shows that, in markets with transaction costs, even if a redundant security does not even save individual investors’ total costs for their security trading, the prices of the other securities may well be different were it to not be available for trade, resulting in a different equilibrium consumption allocation. In this sense, a redundant security may give rise to the divergence of i...

We analyze a model in which traders have different trading opportunities and learn information from prices. The difference in trading opportunities implies that different traders may have different trading motives when trading in the same market—some trade for speculation and others for hedging—and thus they may respond to the same information in opposite directions. This implies that adding mo...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information about future earnings that is unrelated to current earnings. In response to good advance information, stock prices increase and informed investors act as trend chasers, increasing their inve...

Retirement flexibility and inability to borrow against future labor income can significantly affect optimal consumption and investment. With voluntary retirement, there exists an optimal wealth-to-wage ratio threshold for retirement and human capital correlates negatively with the stock market even when wages have zero or slightly positive market risk exposure. Consequently, investors optimally...