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 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...

Family ties and kinship networks play an important role in sharing risk under unanticipated shocks, especially under insufficient social security. In this paper, we use panel data based on a massive household survey to examine the risk-sharing networks and their heterogeneous impacts on...

Background: In making investment decisions, asset risk and return are two crucial criteria on which investors base their decision. Objectives: This paper provides risk and return analysis and compares different traditional and alternative investments with special emphasis on the COVID-19 crisis....

We exploit the US Survey of Consumer Finances from 1998 to 2010 to study households' portfolio risk. We compare alternative measures of ex-ante risk, based on a financial portfolio including deposits, bonds and stocks, or a broader portfolio also including real estate, business wealth and...

Does economic policy uncertainty affect household stockholding? To answer this question we create a novel measure of household exposure to economic policy uncertainty news by combining survey information on the hours a household spends in reading newspapers and the frequency of such news in the...

I solve the life-cycle portfolio allocation problem of a disappointment averse (DA) agent. DA agents overweight disappointing outcomes. Unlike expected utility investors, DA investors drastically cut their allocation to stocks around retirement due to a distinct effect associated with the drop...

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...

2020 has been a time of unprecedented change. Financial markets and consumer confidence have collapsed. The unemployment rate has reached double digits; the United States appears headed into a recession. Financial planning is in more demand as individuals and financial markets react to the...

Asset allocation models have evolved in complexity with the development of modern portfolio theory, but they continue to operate under the assumption of investor rationality and other assumptions that do not hold in the real world. For this reason, academics and industry professionals make...