NBER Publications by Yi-Li Chien

Our paper examines whether intermittent portfolio re-balancing on the part of some stock market investors can help to explain the counter-cyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up an incomplete markets model in which CRRA-utility investors are subject to aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks and have heterogeneous trading technologies. In our model, a large mass of passive investors do not re-balance their portfolio shares in response to aggregate shocks, while a smaller mass of active investors adjust their portfolio each period to respond to changes in the investment opportunity set. We find that intermittent re-balancers amplify the effect of aggregate shocks on the time variation in risk premia by a factor of three in a cal...

Our paper examines the impact of heterogeneous trading technologies for households on asset prices and the distribution of wealth. We distinguish between passive traders who hold fixed portfolios of stocks and bonds, and active traders who adjust their portfolios to changes in the investment opportunity set. In the presence of non-participants, the fraction of total wealth held by active traders is critical for asset prices, because only these traders respond to variation in state prices and hence help to clear the market, not the fraction of wealth held by all agents that participate in asset markets. We calibrate this heterogeneity to match the equity premium and the risk-free rate. The calibrated model reproduces the skewness and kurtosis of the wealth distribution in the data. To solve...

We introduce limited liability in a model with a continuum of ex ante identical agents who face aggregate and idiosyncratic income risk. These agents can trade a complete menu of contingent claims, but they cannot commit and shares in a Lucas tree serve as collateral to back up their state-contingent promises. The limited liability option gives rise to a second risk factor, in addition to aggregate consumption growth risk. This liquidity risk is created by binding solvency constraints, and it is measured by the growth rate of one moment of the wealth distribution. The economy is said to experience a negative liquidity shock when this growth rate is high and a large fraction of agents faces severely binding solvency constraints. The adjustment to the Breeden-Lucas stochastic discount fact...