This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the effect of hypothetical personal experience on the adoption of a new insurance product in rural China. Specifically, we conduct a set of insurance games with a random subset of farmers. Our findings show that playing insurance games...

This article simulates the savings rates required to meet retirement income goals in the worst-case scenario from overlapping historical periods for savers in 19 developed market countries. In the baseline, workers save for 30 years to replace 50 percent of their pre-retirement net income with...

Factors such as the spread of complex financial instruments, the broadening of available alternatives, have fostered more decisive public intervention in support of transparency between banks and their customers. The effectiveness of the public intervention measures depends on the actual...

An important and frequently studied question for retirees is: what is the optimal asset allocation during retirement? This article provides a brief but simple message that conservative asset allocations in retirement are quite acceptable after all. A wide range of asset allocations tend to...

This study compares the performance of various fixed and lifecycle portfolio strategies for the accumulation phase of retirement planning in emerging market countries. With an expected utility framework and a bootstrapped Monte Carlo procedure, we find that the majority of emerging market...

Shortfall risk retirement income analyses offer little insight into how much risk is optimal, and how risk tolerance affects retirement income decisions. This study models retirement income risk in a manner consistent with risk tolerance in portfolio selection in order to estimate optimal asset...

Most retirement withdrawal rate studies are either based on historical data or use a particular assumption about portfolio returns unique to the study in question. But planners may have their own capital market expectations for future returns from stocks, bonds, and other assets they deem...

Investment behavior is traditionally investigated with the assumption that risky investment is on average advantageous. However, this may not always be the case. In this paper, we experimentally studied investment choices made by students and financial professionals under favorable and...

The stock index “point” is a focal component of financial news reports. While much attention is paid to changes in stock index point totals, few people realize that the value of a stock index “point” varies (and has recently declined). We call this perceptual phenomenon “point...

The complex methodology used in financial portfolio management proves that H. Markowitz optimization approach is one of the most applied techniques on developed global financial markets. Financial information spreading and processing speed, real time access to information, the performance...