The strategic asset allocation is the most important decision an investor undertakes. An adequate foundation requires a multi-step, structured process. The investor needs a realistic view of capital market behaviour and has to examine his own goals, his risk tolerance and maybe further...

We introduce a model for portfolio selection with an extendable investment universe where the agent faces a trade-off between exploiting existing and exploring for new investment opportunities. An agent with mean-variance preferences starts with an existing investment universe consisting of a...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the portfolio selection of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...

We study the interplay between tenure decisions, stock market investment and the public social security system. Housing equity not only serves a dual purpose as a consumption good and as an asset, but also provides insurance to buffer various risks in retirement. Our life cycle model captures...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of European countries and utilizes unique data on natives and immigrants....

We use data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to explore how household asset portfolios in the United States evolved between 1989 and 2016. Throughout this period, two key assets - housing and financial market assets - drove the household balance sheet evolution;...

Many institutional investors depend on the returns they generate to fund their operations and liabilities. How do these investors' financial conditions affect the management of their portfolios? We address this issue using the insurance industry because insurers are large investors for which...