The paper documents lack of awareness of financial assets in the 1995 and 1998 Bank of Italy Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. It then explores the determinants of awareness, and finds that the probability that survey respondents are aware of stocks, mutual funds and investment accounts is...

We study the life cycle of portfolio allocation following for 15 years a large random sample of Norwegian households using error-free data on all components of households' investments drawn from the Tax Registry. Both, participation in the stock market and the portfolio share in stocks, have...

Estimating the effect of background risk on individual financial choices faces two challenges. First, the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of human capital risk that qualifies as "background" (a risk that an individual cannot diversify or avoid)....