Christian Heyerdahl-Larsen

Journal of Financial Economics 175 p. 1-16 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2025.104191

Disagreement about macroeconomic fundamentals accounts for only part of the disagreement about future interest rates, creating a ‘‘disagreement correlation’’ puzzle. This puzzle arises because standard equilibrium models with belief differences predict a strong link between asset return disagreement and fundamental disagreement, a link not supported by the data. We address this puzzle by introducing a model where disagreement about future demand for savings—driven by disagreement over the prevalence of patient versus impatient investors in the economy—generates asset return disagreement. Our mechanism produces stochastic yield volatility, time-varying bond risk premia, and an upward-sloping yield curve. Empirically, we construct a proxy for demand disagreement by isolating the component of yield disagreement unrelated to disagreement about macro-fundamentals. This proxy is positively related to yields and their volatilities, and predicts future bond risk premia, consistent with the predictions of our demand disagreement model.

Social Choice and Welfare 61 p. 763-763 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-023-01467-1

We analyze multiple-beliefs based efficiency measures in economies with risk and disagreement, including belief neutral efficiency and inefficiency, incomplete knowledge efficiency, efficiency based on unanimity, and utility aggregators that minimize Bergson welfare functions over multiple beliefs. We provide equivalence results under technical conditions that are satisfied in several work-horse economies, including the exchange economy and a standard economy with a linear production technology. We also provide several examples for which these measures differ. Our results show that the further away one gets from the standard exchange economy, the more the different multiple-beliefs based measures differ in the allocations they identify as efficient, in general. Consequently, the more important the choice of efficiency measures becomes.

The Review of financial studies 35(4) p. 1775-1812 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhab068

Abstract We study consumption, savings, and asset prices in economies with disagreement and production, focusing on settings with real effects of disagreement. Aggregate savings may be significantly distorted under disagreement, possibly related to the undersaving puzzle. In the production economy, mispricing mainly manifests itself in idiosyncratic risk, in contrast to the exchange economy, where the risk-free rate and expected return on the market may be distorted. Potential policy implications include the introduction of investment taxes or subsidies. Our results highlight the real effects of disagreement in financial markets, and the differences between economies with and without production.

Journal of Financial Economics 127(3) p. 459-484 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2018.01.001

Review of Economic Studies 85(3) p. 1752-1780 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdx077

We study asset prices and portfolio choice with overlapping generations, where the young disregard history to learn from own experience. Disregarding history implies less precise estimates of output growth, which in equilibrium leads the young to increase their investment in risky assets after positive returns, that is, they act as trend chasers. In equilibrium, the risk premium decreases after a positive shock and, therefore, trend chasing young agents lose wealth relative to old agents who behave as contrarians. Consistent with findings from survey data, the average belief about the risk premium in the economy relates negatively to future excess returns and is smoother than the true risk premium.

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