Little is known about the degree to which individuals are uncertain about their future Social Security benefits, how this varies within the U.S. population, and whether this uncertainty influences financial decisions related to retirement planning. To illuminate these issues, we present...

Though risk attitude is central to economics and finance, relatively little is known about how it is formed and how it changes over time. Based on US data from a dedicated psycho-social module on lifestyle of the 2010 Health and Retirement Study (HRS), we provide new evidence on the correlation...

Models can be wrong and recognising their limitations is important in financial and economic decision making under uncertainty. Robust strategies, which are least sensitive to perturbations of the underlying model, take uncertainty into account. Finding the explicit set of alternative models...

We explicitly derive and explore the optimal consumption and portfolio policies of a loss- averse individual who endogenously updates his reference level over time. We find that he protects his current consumption by delaying painful reductions in consumption after a drop in wealth, and...

We test the relation between ambiguity aversion and five household portfolio choice puzzles: non-participation in equities, low allocations to equity, home-bias, own-company stock ownership, and portfolio under-diversification. In a representative U.S. household survey, we measure ambiguity...

Reverse mortgages help elderly homeowners to unlock and consume home equity while continuing residing in their homes. Demand for reverse mortgage is far behind predictions. Based on a survey of U.S. homeowners aged 58 we assess product knowledge (literacy) and its relation to reverse mortgage...

We develop a structural econometric model to elicit household-specific expectations about future financial asset returns and risk attitudes by using data on observed portfolio holdings and self-assessed willingness to bear financial risk. Our framework assumes that household portfolios are...

We use a panel dataset from the Dutch Household Survey, covering annually the period 1995-2012, to analyse whether individual financial risk taste changes over time with the background macroeconomic and financial conditions, as well as personal and subjective exposure to portfolio risk....

Using a theorem showing that matching probabilities of ambiguous events can capture ambiguity attitudes, we introduce a tractable method for measuring ambiguity attitudes and apply it in a large representative sample. In addition to ambiguity aversion, we confirm an ambiguity component recently...

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...