Rationalizing Trading Frequency and Returns

Yosef Bonaparte, Russell Cooper
National Bureau of Economic Research,Issue w16022,

Barber and Odean (2000) study the relationship between trading frequency andreturns. They find that households who trade more frequently have a lower net return than other households. But all households have about the same gross return. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to overconfidence. Using a dynamic optimization approach, we find that neither a model with rational agents facing adjustment costs nor various models of …
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