What Matters to Individual Investors in a Welfare State?

We survey a representative sample of Finnish individual investors to rank the importance of 37 factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share and compare the results to a recent US survey (Choi and Robertson, Journal of Finance, 2020). Investors in both countries regard years until retirement, need to hold cash, and experience of living through returns as important. US investors put relatively more emphasis on hedging background risks, while Finnish investors put weight on return beliefs, media, and personal experiences. These different attitudes likely reflect the differences in social welfare systems between these two countries