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...

The funding ratio is a financial indicator to measure the viability of pension funds. The paper analyzes how Swiss occupational pension funds' technical discount rate and asset allocation are related to the funding ratio. The paper shows that funds with weaker funding ratios apply higher rates...

Czarnitzki and Stadtmann (2005) measure the interdependence of demand for investment advice (approximated by sales of investor magazines) and stock prices. They find strong evidence that confirms the presence of the disposition effect, i.e. the empirical observation that investors sell winners...

In this paper I study the relationship between rationality and asset prices when agents have heterogeneous and incorrect beliefs about future events. Using the fully rational pricing as a benchmark, I show that when agents behave according to the Subjective Generalized Kelly rule (Bottazzi et...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

We examine the relationship between households’ demand for traditional money and the proliferation of alternative financial assets using a cross-section of countries. We have found that the inclusion of the disaggregated indicators of financial assets improves the money demand models. Notably,...

In this article we derive a microfounded model of money demand under uncertainty built on intertemporally optimizing risk-averse households. Deriving a complete solution of the optimization problem taking the intertemporal budget constraint into account where linearization procedures in our...

This chapter puts forward a manual for how to setup and solve a continuous time model that allows to analyze endogenous (1) level and risk dynamics. The latter includes (2) tail risk and crisis probability as well as (3) the Volatility Paradox. Concepts such as (4) illiquidity and liquidity...

The paper first shows that financial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due to the boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might cause an infinite...