Several scholars analyze the relationship between individuals’ willingness to take risks and financial investment decisions. We add to this literature in using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel which allow ruling out that investments in risky assets itself impact on risk attitudes. We...

We define a class of risk-taking-neutral (RTN) background risks. These background risks have the property that they will not alter decisions made with respect to another risk, for individuals with HARA utility. If we wish to compare a decision made with and without some exogenous background...

We investigate the determinants of a household's decision on whether to invest in risky financial assets. Financial theory suggests that with increasing labor income risk, the reluctance of households to hold stocks increases. We propose to measure income risk as the observed variation of...

This report is a brief of the actual research and discusses two ways of asset allocation in Hedge Funds to generate alpha over the fund of hedge funds. The fund of hedge funds have fallen out of favour for investors seeking alternative investments as they have lagged the general market returns....

Empirical Studies of household portfolios have shown that young and relatively poor households hold under-diversified portfolios that are concentrated in a small number of assets, a fact often attributed to various behavioral biases. We present a model in which relatively poor investors, i.e.,...

We show that preferred investment styles can be determined by the big five personality traits. Using this result, we build a tool that recommends investment styles. The resulting recommendations are significantly higher rated than random recommendations.We collected detailed personality traits...

We analyze different investment strategies by comparing them over a variety of investment horizons. As expected Utility Theory cannot explain the attractiveness of empirically observed strategies, we apply a behavioral approach instead. In particular, we assess attractiveness from the viewpoint...

This paper examines a continuous-time intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem for an investor with recursive preferences. The investor worries about model misspecification and seeks robust decision rules. The expected excess return of a risky asset follows a mean-reverting...

This paper studies the aggregation of a downside risk measure introduced by Fishburn (1977). Properties of aggregated downside risk are examined and compared to classical risk measures such as standard deviation and value-at-risk. The notion of downside-efficient portfolios that maximize the...

This study examines the practical performance of the multiple priors optimal portfolio based on the mean-variance preference. The multiple priors optimal portfolio is designed to be robust to model uncertainty, also known as ambiguity. A back test finds two properties: the multiple priors...