This paper reexamines the relation between various downside risk measures and future equity returns in a global context that spans 26 developed markets. We find that there is no significantly positive relation between systematic downside risk and the cross-section of equity returns, and in fact,...

Does economic policy uncertainty affect household stockholding? To answer this question we create a novel measure of household exposure to economic policy uncertainty news by combining survey information on the hours a household spends in reading newspapers and the frequency of such news in the...

We investigate US households' direct investment in stocks, bonds and liquid accounts and their foreign counterparts, in order to identify the different participation hurdles affecting asset investment domestically and overseas. To this end, we estimate a trivariate probit model with three...

We investigate the effects of both trust and sociability for stock market participation, the role of which has been examined separately by existing finance literature. We use internationally comparable household data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe supplemented with...

We investigate the relation between downside beta and stock returns in a global context using more than 170 million daily return observations. Contrary to the findings in the U.S. equity market, we show that downside beta does not explain the cross-sectional differences in future and...

This article investigates the importance of both trust and sociability for stock market participation and for differences in stock-holding across Europe. We estimate significant effects for the two, and find that sociability can partly balance the discouragement effect on stock-holding induced...

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 counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

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 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...