To estimate the monetary value of ideal financial planning advice, we address three types of benefits that planners provide: increasing wealth, preventing loss, and smoothing consumption. We discuss, then reject the possibility of using survey data to obtain valid estimates of the benefit of...

Conventional advice is to reduce risky investments as one ages. Such a generalized focus on risk avoidance may be inappropriate for elderly with longer life spans and those with financial goals that extend beyond their lifetime. To better understand risky asset holdings among the elderly, we...

Using six Survey of Consumer Finances cross-sectional datasets representing the years 1983-2001, this study investigates changes in financial risk tolerance levels over time. Logit analyses are performed to test changes in risk tolerance, controlling for respondent and household characteristics....

About 20% of U.S. households are credit constrained. This research analyzes credit constraints among those who have applied for credit and controls for the effects of past credit behavior on being credit constrained. It is the first to identify the impact on being credit constrained of being...

Although there are over one million same-sex couple households in the United States, there has not been much research on their investment attitudes and behavior. This study uses datasets from the combined 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2001 Surveys of Consumer Finance to compare same-sex couples to other...

Most research studying family financial behavior of racial/ethnic groups has ignored Asian households or arbitrarily combined them with other racial/ethnic groups. We treated Asian households as a separate racial/ethnic group to compare twelve financial behaviors and attitudes of Asian...