Sentiment and Speculation in a Market with Heterogeneous Beliefs
Online seminar via Zoom Thursday, September 17, 2020 11:00 am Sentiment and speculation in a market with heterogeneous beliefs Ian Martin Dimitris Papadimitriou∗ April, 2020 Abstract We present a model featuring risk-averse investors with heterogeneous beliefs. Individuals who are correct in hindsight, whether through luck or judgment, be- come relatively wealthy. As a result, market sentiment is bullish following good news and bearish following bad news. Sentiment drives up volatility, and hence also risk premia. In a continuous-time Brownian limit, moderate investors trade against market sentiment in the hope of capturing a variance risk premium created by the presence of extremists. In a Poisson limit that features sudden arrivals of information, CDS rates spike following bad news and decline during quiet times. ∗Martin: London School of Economics, http://personal.lse.ac.uk/martiniw/. Papadimitriou: University of Bristol, https://sites.google.com/site/papadimitrioudea/. We thank Brandon Han, Nobu Kiyotaki, John Moore, Jeremy Stein, Andrei Shleifer, John Campbell, Eben Lazarus, Pe- ter DeMarzo and seminar participants at LSE, Arizona State University, Harvard University, HKUST, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SAIF) and the NBER Summer Institute for comments. Ian Martin is grateful for support from the Paul Woolley Centre and from the ERC under Starting Grant 639744. 1 In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine. |Benjamin Graham. In this paper, we study the effect of heterogeneity in beliefs on asset prices. We work with a frictionless dynamically complete market populated by a continuum of risk-averse agents who differ in their beliefs about the probability of good news.
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