This paper reconsiders the predictions of the standard option pricing models in the context of incomplete markets. We relax the completeness assumption of the Black-Scholes (1973) model and as an immediate consequence we can no longer construct a replicating portfolio to price the option....

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

We search for a trading strategy and the associated robust price of unhedgeable assets in incomplete markets under the acknowledgement of model uncertainty. Our set-up is that we postulate an agent who wants to maximise the expected surplus by choosing an optimal investment strategy....

We investigate inattention on the part of pension plan participants using a novel dataset covering savings in Sweden's Premium Pension System, data that permit direct comparison of the investment behaviors of pension and retail mutual fund investors. Unlike retail mutual fund investors, pension...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counter-factual techniques to decompose observed...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

This paper examines the influence of both trust and sociability on stock market participation and their implications for international differences in stockholding. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe supplemented with information on regional trust from the World...

We estimate the myopic (single-period) and intertemporal hedging (long-run) demand for stocks in 20 growth-leading emerging market economies and the US during the 1999-2012 period. We consider two types of emerging market investors: a domestic investor (whose returns are denominated in the local...

Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...

We examine the daily activity and performance of a large panel of individual investors in Sweden's Premium Pension System in the period 2000 to 2010. We find that active investors outperform passive investors, and that there is a causal effect of fund changes on performance. Chosen funds...