From the field's leading authority, the most authoritative and comprehensive advanced-level textbook on asset pricing In Financial Decisions and Markets, John Campbell, one of the field’s most respected authorities, provides a broad graduate-level overview of asset pricing. He introduces students to leading theories of portfolio choice, their implications for asset prices, and empirical patterns of risk and return in financial markets. Campbell emphasizes the interplay of theory and evidence, as theorists respond to empirical puzzles by developing models with new testable implications. The book shows how models make predictions not only about asset prices but also about investors’ financial positions, and how they often draw on insights from behavioral economics. After a careful introduction to single-period models, Campbell develops multiperiod models with time-varying discount rates, reviews the leading approaches to consumption-based asset pricing, and integrates the study of equities and fixed-income securities. He discusses models with heterogeneous agents who use financial markets to share their risks, but also may speculate against one another on the basis of different beliefs or private information. Campbell takes a broad view of the field, linking asset pricing to related areas, including financial econometrics, household finance, and macroeconomics. The textbook works in discrete time throughout, and does not require stochastic calculus. Problems are provided at the end of each chapter to challenge students to develop their understanding of the main issues in financial economics. The most comprehensive and balanced textbook on asset pricing available, Financial Decisions and Markets is an essential resource for all graduate students and practitioners in finance and related fields. Integrated treatment of asset pricing theory and empirical evidence Emphasis on investors’ decisions Broad view linking the field to financial econometrics, household finance, and macroeconomics Topics treated in discrete time, with no requirement for stochastic calculus Forthcoming solutions manual for problems available to professors

Within the standard mean-variance framework, this paper provides a procedure to aggregate the heterogeneous beliefs in not only risk preferences and expected payoffs but also variances/covariances into a market consensus belief. Consequently, an asset equilibrium price under heterogeneous beliefs is derived. We show that the market aggregate behavior is in principle a weighted average of heterogeneous individual behaviors. The CAPM-like equilibrium price and return relationships under heterogeneous beliefs are obtained. The impact of diversity of heterogeneous beliefs on the market aggregate risk preference, asset volatility, equilibrium price and optimal demands of investors is examined. As a special case, our result provides a simple explanation for the empirical relation between cross-sectional volatility and expected returns.

We consider a pure exchange economy where the drift of aggregate consumption is unobservable. Agents with heterogeneous beliefs and preferences act competitively on financial and goods markets. We discuss how equilibrium market prices of risk differ across agents, and in particular we discuss the properties of the market price of risk under the physical (objective) probability measure. We propose a number of specifications of risk aversions and beliefs where the market price of risk is much higher, and the riskless rate of return lower, than in the equivalent full information economy (homogeneous and heterogeneous preferences) and thus can provide an(other) answer to the equity premium and risk-free rate puzzles. We also derive a representation of the equilibrium volatility and numerically assess the role of heterogeneity in beliefs. We show that a high level of stock volatility can be obtained with a low level of aggregate consumption volatility when beliefs are heterogeneous. Finally, we discuss how incomplete information may explain the apparent predictability in stock returns and show that in-sample predictability cannot be exploited by the agents, as it is in fact a result of their learning processes.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the impact of heterogeneous beliefs in an otherwise standard competitive complete markets discrete time economy. The construction of a consensus belief, as well as a consensus consumer are shown to be valid modulo a predictable aggregation bias, which takes the form of a discount factor. We use our construction of a consensus consumer to investigate the impact of beliefs heterogeneity on the CCAPM and on the expression of the risk free rate. We focus on the pessimism/doubt of the consensus consumer and we study their impact on the equilibrium characteristics (market price of risk, risk free rate). We finally analyze how pessimism and doubt at the aggregate level result from pessimism and doubt at the individual level.

Excerpt from Evaluating the Effects of Incomplete Markets on Risk Sharing and Asset Pricing Incomplete markets in the form of an inability to borrow against risky future income has been proposed as an explanation for the poor predictive power of the standard consumption-based asset pricing model.1 With complete markets, individuals fully insure against idiosyncratic income shocks, and individual consumption is proportional to aggregate consumption.2 With limited insurance markets, however, individual consumption variability may exceed that of the aggregate, and the implied asset prices may differ significantly from those predicted by a representative consumer model. In this paper we study an economy in which agents cannot write contracts contingent on future labor income realizations. They face aggregate uncertainty in the form of dividend and systematic labor income risk, and also idiosyncratic labor income risk. Idiosyncratic income shocks can be buffered by trading in financial securities, but the extent of trade is limited by borrowing constraints, short sales constraints and transactions costs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.