We conduct controlled experiments in order to analyze individual trading behavior. Our results suggest that investors measure their gains relative to their initial wealth, and that this reference point together with past stock price changes determine the portfolio choices. Subjects choose a...

The prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the cumulative prospect theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) are descriptive models for decision making that summarize several violations of the expected utility theory. This paper gives a survey of applications of prospect theory to the...

Economists have forcefully argued for the introduction and use of property derivatives as a hedge against house price risk (e.g. Shiller and Weiss, 1999). The rationale for these financial instruments seems clear, as many households are heavily invested in housing and standard financial...

Der Beitrag greift das in der Literatur wenig beleuchtete Problem der vorteilhaftenStrukturierung einer Immobilienfinanzierung für Privatinvestoren ausgehend von am Marktbeobachtbaren unterschiedlichen angebotenen Nominalzinssätzen auf. Es werden bislangunbehandelte Optimierungspotenziale...

We introduce a framework for analyzing the interplay between credit risk and collateralmarket risk on loan pricing. To do this, we decompose any loan into an unsecured and asecured part. Further we explicitly consider the recovery process. The framework allows usto develop semi-analytical...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

It is widely agreed that the early years are a particularly important time forefforts to increase social mobility, because a good deal of inequality is alreadyapparent by the time children start school, and because children’s developmentmay be less amenable to change after they enter school....

There is a well-established positive correlation between life-satisfaction measures andincome in individual level cross-sectional data. This paper attempts to provide some evidenceon whether this correlation reflects causality running from money to happiness. I use industrywage differentials as...

We study a variant of the conventional keeping-up-with-the-Joneses setup in whichheterogeneous-ability agents care both about consumption and leisure and receive anutility premium if their consumption exceeds that of the Joneses’. Unlike the conventionalsetup in which all agents are assumed to...

Fungibility of money is a central principle in economics. It implies that any unit of money is substitutable for another and that the composition of income is irrelevant for consumption. We find in a field experiment that even in a simple, incentivized setup many subjects do not treat money as...