King, Mervyn A. <br/><br/>
Asset Accumulation, Information, and the Life Cycle / 
Mervyn A. King, Jonathan I. Leape. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  1987. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w2392 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w2392. .
<br/><br/> September 1987. 
<br/><br/> Empirical tests of the life cycle model have focused on its implications for the level of a household's total net worth and paid little attention to changes in portfolio composition over the life cycle. In this paper, we examine a new survey of the asset holdings of 6,010 U.S households and show that there is a pronounced life-cycle pattern to both the number and value of assets held by U.S. households. Direct survey evidence suggests that incomplete information is a significant determinant of household portfolio composition. We test the hypothesis that information about investment opportunities arrives stochastically over time, estimating a Poisson model for the arrival of new information. 
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