Private investors increasingly use passive investment strategies, i.e. investment methods that try to replicate a stock market index as accurate as possible. In this paper we compare retail index certificates and exchange traded funds. Both investment products promise a performance that...

We propose a new decision criterion under risk in which people extract both utility from anticipatory feelings ex ante and disutility from disappointment ex post. The decision maker chooses his degree of optimism, given that more optimism raises both the utility of ex ante feelings and the risk...

This study explores people's risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in...

In a mean variance framework, we analyse risk taking in the presence of a (possibly) dependent background risk, exemplified in a linear portfolio selection problem. We first characterise the comparative statics of changes in the distribution and dependence structure of the background risk. For...