Wider participation in stockholding is often presumed to reduce wealth inequality. We measure and decompose changes in US wealth inequality between 1989 and 2001, a period of considerable spread of equity culture. Inequality in equity wealth is found to be important for net wealth inequality,...

This paper examines the proportion of wealth invested in stock and bond portfolios as a function of the investors' age, i.e., investment horizon. It has become increasingly popular to advice investors to relocate their funds from a primarily stock portfolio to a primarily bond portfolio as they...

This paper examines the cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns. The results indicate that (i) data frequency used to estimate idiosyncratic volatility, (ii) weighting scheme used to compute average portfolio returns, (iii) breakpoints utilized to...

Is wider access to stockholding opportunities related to reduced wealth inequality, given that it creates challenges for small and less sophisticated investors? Counterfactual analysis is used to study the influence of changes in the US stockholder pool and economic environment, on the...

This paper investigates the role of skewness preference in cross-sectional pricing of NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stocks over the long sample period of January 1926-December 2005 as well as two subsamples. Portfolio-level analyses and the firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and...

We investigate, using the 2002 US Health and Retirement Study, individuals' insecurity and expectations about terrorism, and their effects on household financial decisions. We find that those without any military experience, the less educated, the more religious and females worry a lot about...

Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

This paper examines the returns to investment strategies based on the interactions between value-to-market indicators and corporate financing transactions that increase or decrease the firm's outstanding equity, i.e., equity issues and repurchases. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level...

This paper examines the intertemporal relation between risk and return for the aggregate stock market using high-frequency data. We use daily realized, GARCH, implied, and range-based volatility estimators to determine the existence and significance of a risk-return tradeoff for several stock...