We investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women do. Apart from the traditional explanation of a gender difference in risk aversion, gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold riskier assets. Our...

Modellierung der Abhängigkeiten zwischen Ausfall, Verlustrate und Forderungshöhe bei Ausfall mit Faktoren und Copulae -- Multivariate Erweiterung des Heckman-Schätzers, um der Stichprobenselektion seitens der Verlustrate und der Forderungshöhe gerecht zu werden -- Empirische Befunde zur...

The finance literature looks at a number of factors to explain risk premia in corporate debt, such as liquidity effects, jump-to-default risk, and contagion risk. Stochastic recovery rates as a source of systematic risk have not received much attention so far, most likely due to the difficulties...

Credit Risk Measurement in the Context of Basel II -- Concentration Risk in Credit Portfolios and Its Treatment Under Basel II -- Model-Based Measurement of Name Concentration Risk in Credit Portfolios -- Model-Based Measurement of Sector Concentration Risk in Credit Portfolios -- Conclusion

We measure individual-level loss aversion using three incentivized, representative surveys of the U.S. population (combined N=3,000). We find that around 50% of the U.S. population is loss tolerant, with many participants accepting negative-expected-value gambles. This is counter to earlier...

Most decisions involve variability in two dimensions: uncertainty across states of nature and fluctuations over time. The stakes involved in tradeoffs between these variability dimensions are especially high for the poor who have difficulty managing and recovering from shocks. We assume Epstein...

In a stochastic economy, long run consumption and output may not be bounded away from zero even when productivity is arbitrarily high near zero and uncertainty is arbitrarily small. In the one-sector stochastic optimal growth model with i.i.d. production shocks, we characterize the nature of...

We study the problem of risk sharing within a household or syndicate. A household shares risky prospects using a social welfare functional. We characterize the social welfare functionals such that the household is collectively less risk averse than each member, and satisfies the Pareto principle...

While CBOE's VIX index is widely acknowledged as a broad-based investor “fear gauge” for its strong inverse relationship with major equity indexes, one cannot necessarily expect it to translate to the level of future turbulence or investor risk aversion in fixed-income markets. Indeed,...