Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach in this literature, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that the association between household wealth portfolios at...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

This paper analyzes the portfolio allocations of couple-headed, Hispanic families using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data. Our results reveal that Hispanic couples as a group are less wealthy than otherwise similar white couples, although there is substantial variation...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...

We investigate the role of financial advice in shaping the composition of household portfolios in Great Britain. Advice is associated with a reallocation of wealth away from real estate and towards bonds and stocks, especially when households seek financial advice "for investments". Having a...

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that younger households' participation decisions in assets are more responsive...

This paper bridges the financial market and the marriage market using a reference-dependent mechanism. Male-biased sex ratios induce families with sons to hold more risky assets, since competitive marital payment in a tight market raises the reference level of marriage expenditure for such...