We document novel facts on the exit and reentry margins of stock market participation by retail investors using detailed administrative data on every Norwegian resident from 1993 to 2016. Contrary to the conventional view that individuals either never or always participate in the stock market,...

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lottery non-participants by 12 percentage points, while pre-lottery stock holders are unaffected....

This paper examines empirically the effect of the level of personal bankruptcy protection in the US on households' demand for financial assets. A Chapter 7 bankruptcy allows protecting the home equity up to a certain limit or "exemption". Previous literature shows that such exemption biases...

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...

Do memories of highly emotional stock market crashes permanently affect the investment decisions of households? The Initial Public Offerings of Deutsche Telekom during 1996- 2000 provide an optimal base to address this question, as it is known for its emotional character and is reputedly “the...

Do memories of highly emotional stock market crashes permanently affect the investment decisions of households? The Initial Public Offerings of Deutsche Telekom during 1996- 2000 provide an optimal base to address this question, as it is known for its emotional character and is reputedly "the...

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.,...

In this paper, we consider the ruin probability minimization of an insurance company that buys proportional reinsurance and invests in markets where borrowing is constrained. We use a diffusion approximation model for the surplus process of this company and assume that the company invests its...

Cryptocurrencies have left the dark side of the finance universe and become an object of study for asset and portfolio management. Since they have a low liquidity compared to traditional assets, one needs to take into account liquidity issues when adding them to the same portfolio. We propose a...