Despite its importance for the analysis of life-cycle behavior and, in particular, retirement planning, stock ownership by private households is poorly understood. Among other approaches to investigate these puzzles, recent research has started to elicit private households' expectations of stock...

This paper compares two different types of annuity providers, i.e. defined benefit pension funds and life insurance companies. One of the key differences is that the residual risk in pension funds is collectively borne by the beneficiaries and the sponsor while in the case of life insurers, it...

Abstract We consider three measures on the systemic importance of a financial institu- tion within a interconnected financial system. Based on the measures, we study the relation between the size of a financial institution and its systemic importance. From both theo- retical model and empirical...

Empirical research on contagion between international stock markets generally focuses on market returns converted to US dollars, as this would be consistent with the perspective of an international investor. This note argues that such a conversion is inappropriate, since only returns denominated...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a red herring&; once one corrects for the endogeneity of natural resource exports and allows resource abundance to have an effect on growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer...

The paper investigates risk attitudes among different types of individuals. We use several different measures of risk attitudes, including questions on choices between uncertain income streams suggested by Barsky et al. (1997) and a number of ad hoc measures. As in Barsky et al. (1997) and...

In this paper, we study the aggregated risk from dependent risk factors under the multivariate Extreme Value theory (EVT) framework. We consider the heavy-tailness of the risk factors as well a non-parametric tail dependence structure. This allows a large scope of models on the dependency. We...

This paper analyzes the relationship between a pension fund with conditionally indexed de.ned benefit liabilities and its sponsor, using contingent claims analysis. As pension funds run a mismatch risk, future surpluses and shortfalls will occur. Surpluses are divided between beneficiaries and...

Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge and skills...

This paper estimates the costs of participating to the stock market, together with the cross sectional dispersion of stock market optimism. Our analysis is based on a mean-variance framework, when there is a riskless asset (cash), which makes the allocation of the investment in risky assets...