The Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Equilibrium Mispricing in a Capital Market with Portfolio Constraints

This paper develops a general equilibrium, continuous time model where portfolio constraints generate mispricing between redundant securities. Constrained consumption-portfolio optimization techniques are adapted to incorporate redundant, possibly mispriced, securities. Under logarithmic preferences, we provide explicit conditions for mispricing and closed-form expressions for all economic quantities. Existence of an equilibrium where mispricing occurs with positive probability is veri ̄ed in a speci ̄c case. In a more general setting, we demonstrate the necessity of mispricing for equilibrium when agents are heterogeneous enough. The construction of a representative agent with stochastic weights allows us to characterize prices and allocations, given mispricing occurs. Journal of Economic Literature Classi ̄cation Numbers: C60, D52, D90, G12.