IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/16335.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do the Effects of Individual Behavioral Biases Cancel Out?

Author

Listed:
  • Uppal, Raman
  • Bhamra, Harjoat Singh

Abstract

A major criticism of behavioral economics is that it has not shown that the idiosyncratic biases of individual investors lead to aggregate effects. We construct a model of a general-equilibrium production economy with a large number of firms and investors. Investors' beliefs about stock returns are determined endogenously based on their psychological distances from firms; consequently, investors are optimistic about some stocks and pessimistic about others. We consider two examples: one where portfolio errors cancel out and the other in which the behavioral biases cancel out when aggregated across investors. We show asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates are still distorted.

Suggested Citation

  • Uppal, Raman & Bhamra, Harjoat Singh, 2021. "Do the Effects of Individual Behavioral Biases Cancel Out?," CEPR Discussion Papers 16335, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16335
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP16335
    Download Restriction: CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Behavioral finance; Money market; Aggregate growth; Stochastic discount factor;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G02 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
    • E03 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Behavioral Macroeconomics
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G41 - Financial Economics - - Behavioral Finance - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making in Financial Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16335. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cepr.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.