Returns merely based on one purchasing price of an asset are uninformative for people regularly contributing to their old-age provision. Here, each purchase has an influence on the outcome. Still, they are commonly used in finance literature, giving an overly optimistic view of expected...

Returns merely based on one purchasing price of an asset are uninformative for people regularly contributing to their old-age provision. Here, each purchase has an influence on the outcome. Still, they are commonly used in finance literature, giving an overly optimistic view of expected...

Making financial decisions under risk and uncertainty has become part of everyday life. Traditional finance explores the objective side of risk, analysing the decisions made by perfectly rational individuals in efficient market conditions. Behavioural finance seeks to connect theory with...

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...

Although financial literature presents ambiguous evidence about the predicting value of fundamental and technical variables in stock markets, we find that evolving trading models based on fundamental variables substantially reduce the risk of investing in stocks. This reduction is so generous...

Do women invest differently than men? We contribute to the answer of this question by analysing the Panel on Household Finances (PHF) of the German Bundesbank. This representative panel collects a wide variety of behavioural and financial variables in the area of household finance. We find that...

We show that household heads with a strong internal economic locus of control are more likely to hold equity and hold a larger share of equity in their investment portfolio. This relation holds when we control for economic preferences and possible confounders such as financial literacy,...

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 find that the index of geopolitical risk (GPR) is significantly associated with both the extensive and intensive margins of stock market participation decisions. The GPR index subsumes the significance of economic policy uncertainty for stock market participation decisions and has long-lasting...

Investment in the financial markets is guided by the trade-off between expected returns and risk appetite of the investor. Higher risks could possibly result in higher expected return on the upside risk but the possibility of massive downside risk of loss must never escape the investor. The...