Monday, March 24, 2014

Heterogeneous Consumption and Asset Pricing in Global Financial Markets

Sergei Sarkissian

This dissertation studies the impact of heterogeneous consumption growth rates across countries on cross-country differences in expected asset returns and tests on the country level the implications of the Constantinides and Duffie (1996) CCAPM which accounts for the investors’ heterogeneity and existence of incomplete markets. The inclusion of the cross-country dispersion of countries’ per-capita consumption growth rates into the standard power utility model has a positive impact on the ability of the model to resolve the risk-free rate, equity premium, and forward premium puzzles. The estimates of the risk aversion parameter are lower, the standard errors are generally smaller, and the time preference parameter decreases towards unity. In addition, the consumption model with  heterogeneity leads to a decrease in the estimates of the Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) distance measure for all types of assets and of most average pricing errors. The tests of the beta pricing relation derived from the original model reveal that more realistic parameter estimates and better overall fit of the new model are achieved primarily due to the negative relation between expected asset returns and the covariance of asset returns with the cross-country consumption dispersion.


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