Yosef Bonaparte, Frank J Fabozzi, David Koslowsky
Applied Economics,Pages: 1-16.
This paper examines the impact of birth order on financial decision-making. In lieu of explanations such as dissimilar parental style across children with different birth orders (due to learning and experience) or the existence of sibling externalities commonly offered in the literature to explain the impact of birth order on financial decision-making, our key conjecture is that birth order influences a host of personality traits, including risk-taking behaviour, and thus financial decisions. Indeed, we find that only born males tolerate greater financial risks and exhibit higher propensity to participate in the stock market. Irrespective of their birth order, only born individuals are 4.7-13.7% more likely to participate in the stock market. Furthermore, we also find that only born males demonstrate more activity in the financial market (higher tendencies to trade assets). Collectively, our stylized results suggest that birth order can be used

Yosef Bonaparte, Russell Cooper, Mengli Sha
National Bureau of Economic Research,Issue w25838,
Barber and Odean study the relationship between trading activity and returns. They find that households who trade more have a lower net return than other households. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to overconfidence. In contrast, we find that household financial choices generated from a dynamic optimization problem with rational agents and portfolio adjustment costs can produce trading and return patterns that closely mimic these facts. Adding various forms of irrationality, modelled as beliefs about income and return processes that are not data based, do not improve the ability of the model to explain the patterns of turnover and net returns. Irrationality can improve the ability of the model to match a larger set of moments, including these turnover and net return moments coupled with those that capture the wealth to income ratio and portfolio composition.

Yosef Bonaparte, Frank J Fabozzi
Applied Economics,Pages: 1-11.

In this article, we estimate the risk aversion for households accounting for their lifetime consumption risk. Households take into account the overall lifetime uninsured consumption risk when optimizing their resources, which based on micro data varies across households. Thus, representing households’ consumption by merging cross-sectional micro data into the single Euler equation (the common approach for estimating risk aversion based on consumption-based asset pricing theory) may be too rough an approximation, leading …
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Yosef Bonaparte, Frank J Fabozzi
Applied Economics Letters,Vol. 24, Issue 13, Pages: 923-927.

This article estimates the elasticity of intertemporal substitution using stockholder actual return experience. The approach is motivated by numerous data sources indicating that the median US stockholder has a portfolio composed of only three or four individual stocks, rather than a well-diversified portfolio as suggested by portfolio theory. Therefore, representing an individual stockholder portfolio by a proxy financial index (the common approach taken in the literature) may be too rough an approximation of investor …
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Yosef Bonaparte, Alok Kumar, Jeremy K Page
Journal of Financial Markets, Volume 34, Pages 69-94

We show that people’s optimism towards financial markets and the macroeconomy is dynamically influenced by their political affiliation and the current political climate. Individuals become more optimistic and perceive markets to be less risky and more undervalued when their preferred party is in power. Accordingly, investors increase allocations to risky assets and exhibit a stronger preference for high market beta, small-cap, and value stocks, and a weaker preference for local stocks. The differences in optimism …
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Yosef Bonaparte, George M. Korniotis and Alok Kumar
Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 113, Issue 2, Pp. 300–324

We examine whether the decision to participate in the stock market and other related portfolio decisions are influenced by income hedging motives. Economic theory predicts that the market participation propensity should increase as the correlation between income growth and stock market returns decreases. Surprisingly, empirical studies find limited support for the income hedging motive. Using a rich, unique Dutch data set and the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth (NLSY) from the United States, we show that when the income-return correlation is low, individuals exhibit a greater propensity to participate in the market and allocate a larger proportion of their wealth to risky assets. Even when the income risk is high, individuals exhibit a higher propensity to participate in the market when the hedging potential is high. These findings suggest that income hedging is an important determinant of stock market participation and asset allocation decisions.

Yosef Bonaparte and Alok Kumar
Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 107, Issue 3, Pp. 760–786

This paper examines whether political activism increases people’s propensity to participate in the stock market. Our key conjecture is that politically active people follow political news more actively, which increases their chance of being exposed to financial news. Consequently, their information gathering costs are likely to be lower and the propensity to participate in the market would be higher. We find support for this hypothesis using multiple micro-level data sets, state-level data from the US, and cross-country data from Europe. Irrespective of their political affiliation, politically active individuals are 9–25% more likely to participate in the stock market. Using residence in “battleground” states and several other geographic instruments, we demonstrate that greater political activism reduces information gathering costs and causes higher market participation rates. Further, consistent with our conjecture, we find that politically active individuals spend about 30 minutes more on news daily and appear more knowledgeable about the economy and the markets.

Yosef Bonaparte, Russell Cooper and Guozhong Zhu
Journal of Monetary Economics, Volume 59, Issue 8, Pp. 751–768

A household’s response to income and return shocks depends on the costs of portfolio adjustment. In particular, the extent of portfolio rebalancing and consumption smoothing are influenced by the presence of non-convex portfolio adjustment costs. Suppose bonds can be adjusted costlessly while adjustments to stock accounts entail adjustment costs. Due to these portfolio adjustment costs, the household demands both stocks and bonds. A household can buffer some income fluctuations without incurring adjustment costs and engage in costly portfolio rebalancing less frequently. Using the estimated preference parameters and portfolio adjustment costs, the response to income and return shocks is nonlinear and reflects the interaction of portfolio rebalancing and consumption smoothing.

Yosef Bonaparte, Russell Cooper, Guozhong Zhu
Journal of Monetary Economics,Vol. 59, Issue 8, Pages: 751-768.

A household’s response to income and return shocks depends on the costs of portfolio adjustment. In particular, the extent of portfolio rebalancing and consumption smoothing are influenced by the presence of non-convex portfolio adjustment costs. Suppose bonds can be adjusted costlessly while adjustments to stock accounts entail adjustment costs. Due to these portfolio adjustment costs, the household demands both stocks and bonds. A household can buffer some income fluctuations without incurring adjustment costs and …
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Yosef Bonaparte and Frank J. Fabozzi
Applied Economics Volume 43, Issue 26, pp. 3835-3847

Since the work by Stigler (1961) on the economics of information in the early 1960s, economists have paid closer attention to the role of search for information. However, search methods are not considered in the theory of portfolio choice. We present a model of investor search behaviour in order to provide a framework by which to evaluate our empirical evidence on the role of search in portfolio selection and performance. We study two types of search methods: informal and professional. We show that the income, wealth and risk preference of households influence their search choice.

Yosef Bonaparte and Frank J. Fabozzi
Economics Letters, Volume 111, Issue 2, pp. 110–112

This paper examines whether there is a discrepancy in estimating the elasticity of intertemporal substitution using food consumption instead of nondurable consumption data. We show that a discrepancy exists and that the discrepancy increases as nondurable consumption increases.

Yosef Bonaparte and Frank Fabozzi
Applied Financial Economics, Volume 21, Issue 3, pp. 119-130.

Studies of household stock market participation report low participation rates. The explanations cited are that the fixed costs associated with participation and high risk aversion discourage households from buying stocks. However, the low participation rate findings are unchallenged. We argue that because prior studies fail to recognize that not all households save, there exists a selection bias when estimating the household participation rate. After correcting for this selection bias, as well as accounting for the influence of subjective expectations on market participation, we show that the unconditional probability of participating in the stock market would increase twofold.

Daniel C. Monchuk, Zhuo Chen and Yosef Bonaparte
China Economic Review,
Vol. 21, Issue 2, June 2010, Pages 346-354,

In this paper we examine more closely the factors associated with production inefficiency in China’s agriculture. The approach we take involves a two-stage process where output efficiency scores are first estimated using data envelopment analysis, and then in the second stage, variation in the resulting efficiency scores is explained using a truncated regression model with inference based on a semi-parametric bootstrap routine. Among the results we find that a heavy industrial presence is associated with reduced agricultural production efficiency and may be an indication that externalities from the industrial process, such as air and ground water pollution, affect agricultural production. We also find evidence that counties with a large percentage of the rural labor force engaged in agriculture tend to be less efficient, and suggests that nurturing and promoting growth of non-primary agriculture may lead to more efficient use of labor resources in agriculture

Daniel C Monchuk, Zhuo Chen, Yosef Bonaparte
China Economic Review,Vol. 21, Issue 2, Pages: 346-354.

In this paper we examine more closely the factors associated with production inefficiency in China’s agriculture. The approach we take involves a two-stage process where output efficiency scores are first estimated using data envelopment analysis, and then in the second stage, variation in the resulting efficiency scores is explained using a truncated regression model with inference based on a semi-parametric bootstrap routine. Among the results we find that a heavy industrial presence is associated with reduced agricultural …
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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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