The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Why do so Few Hold Stocks?
Abstract
We investigate why 75% of United States households do not hold stocks despite the equity premium and predictions of expected-utility models. The question is relevant for privatisation, asset pricing, and tax progressivity issues. We show that risk aversion per se, heterogeneity of beliefs, habit persistence, time non-separability, and quantity constraints on borrowing do not account for the phenomenon. A wedge between borrowing and lending rates, and minimum-investment requirements are plausible but empirically weak factors. More promising explanations are inertia and departures from expected-utility maximisation. There is also qualified support for non-diversifiable income risk as a contributing factor.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy: Theory and Evidence
Lusardi, A., & Mitchell, O. S. (2014) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.52.1.5 · Cited by 4,698
Financial literacy and stock market participation
van Rooij, M., Lusardi, A., & Alessie, R. (2011) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2011.03.006 · Cited by 3,554
Financial Literacy and Planning: Implications for Retirement Wellbeing
Lusardi, A., & Mitchell, O. (2011) · National Bureau of Economic Research · doi:10.3386/w17078 · Cited by 1,253
Down or Out: Assessing the Welfare Costs of Household Investment Mistakes
Calvet, L. E., Campbell, J. Y., & Sodini, P. (2007) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/524204 · Cited by 992
Financial Literacy, Retirement Planning and Household Wealth
van Rooij, M. C. J., Lusardi, A., & Alessie, R. J. M. (2012) · The Economic Journal · doi:10.1111/j.1468-0297.2012.02501.x · Cited by 936
Metadata
- Authors
- Haliassos, M., & Bertaut, C. C.
- Venue
- The Economic Journal
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1995-09
- Volume
- 105
- Issue
- 432
- Pages
- 1110
- ISSN
- 0013-0133 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2008565199
- Cited by
- 1,074
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 48.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Why do so Few Hold Stocks? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2235407
- The paper
- Haliassos, M., & Bertaut, C. C. (1995). Why do so Few Hold Stocks? The Economic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2307/2235407
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
