In contrast to the standard economics theory, an analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finance shows that wealthy investors have a higher return on their stocks than their poorer counterparts. The paper presents a general financial and economic theory of risk and search behavior to address the...

This paper studies the dynamic optimization problem of a household when portfolio adjustment is costly. The analysis is motivated by the observation that on a monthly basis, less than 10% of stockholders typically adjust their portfolio of common stocks. We use this, and related observations, to...