In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because they are opaque, i.e., their payoff-relevant signals are noisy, or because they are fundamentally risky, i.e., the variance of the prior is high. When interest rates are low (high), investors favor opaque (transparent) projects that...

We explore the effect of interest rates on risk taking and find that it depends on the type of risk involved. In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because payoff-relevant signals are noisy or because the dispersion of the prior is high. While both types of risk contribute...

The behavior of asset prices is analyzed in a general equilibrium model where agents not only have preferences over consumption but also (implicitly) over their beliefs. Agents endogenously choose to disregard information contained in a signal if it conflicts with their desired beliefs. In this...

We explore the intuitive idea that more information leads to greater dispersion of posterior beliefs about the expected state of the world. First, we show that two dispersion orders that have been widely used as informativeness criteria do not satisfy the desirable property of ordinality of...

The relationship between risk and asset price fluctuations is studied in a stochastic overlapping generations asset pricing model with i.i.d. production shocks. The non-separability of preferences is an important factor in explaining the time paths of asset prices and returns. We show that the...