Heterogeneity and Asset Prices: An Intergenerational Approach

In an overlapping-generations economy, the consumption growth of a given cohort member (the “marginal agent”) differs from the aggregate consumption growth. A cohort member is faced with long-run consumption uncertainty even in the absence of aggregate (and within-cohort) consumption risk. This uncertainty allows the model to account for several stylized asset-pricing facts (high market price of risk and vol-atility, return predictability, low and nonvolatile interest rate) despite deterministic macroeconomic aggregates and inequality measures that are contemporaneously uncorrelated with asset returns. We devise and implement a methodology to measure the marginal agent’s consumption growth and evaluate the model’s quantitative implications.