Offsetting Disagreement and Security Prices* Byoung-Hyoun Hwang Cornell University and Korea University
[email protected] Dong Lou London School of Economics and CEPR
[email protected] Chengxi Yin Renmin University of China
[email protected] First Draft, March 2013 This Draft: October 2017 * We thank Nick Barberis, Joe Chen, James Choi, Lauren Cohen, Zhi Da, Kent Daniel, Karl Diether, John Hand, Nick Hirschey, Seung Hyun Kim, Matti Keloharju, Ralph Koijen, Chris Malloy, Lasse Pedersen, Christopher Polk, Anna Scherbina, David Solomon, Michela Verardo, Jeff Wurgler, Bu Xu, Sterling Yan, and seminar participants at Central University of Finance and Economics, Fordham University, Indiana University, London Business School, London School of Economics, Purdue University, Renmin University, University of Delaware, Zhejiang University, the 2014 American Finance Association Annual Meeting, the 2014 Helsinki Finance Summit, and the 2014 Finance Symposium on “Information and Asset Prices” for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Moqi Xu and Lauren Cohen for sharing with us some of the data used in this study. We are grateful for funding from the Paul Woolley Center at the London School of Economics. Offsetting Disagreement and Security Prices Abstract Portfolios often trade at substantial discounts relative to the sums of their components (e.g., closed-end funds). We propose a simple, unifying explanation for this phenomenon: Investors often disagree about the value of each individual component; as long as investors’ relative views are not perfectly and positively correlated across components (“investor beliefs cross”), disagreement partially offsets at the portfolio level. That is, investors generally disagree less at the portfolio level than at the individual component level.