This study examines how experiencing a pandemic affects household investment behaviors. By leveraging cross-state variations in the H1N1 mortality rate in 2009, our difference-in-differences analysis reveals interesting findings. Although the pandemic does not significantly affect stock market...

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...

Preference for control affects investment behavior. Participants of laboratory experiments invest different amount of money in a risky asset when face with two different methods of control which have identical payoff structure and probability distribution, but provide different sense of control....

Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...

Using trading data from a sports-wagering market, we estimate individuals' dynamic risk preferences within the prospect-theory paradigm. This market's experimental-like features facilitate preference estimation, and our long panel enables us to study whether preferences vary across individuals...

This study appraises the role of gender in the behavior of individuals who make risky investments. The analysis bases on real-life investment data collected at an online market for peer-to-peer lending. The aim is to find out whether male and female investors differ in propensity for risk taking...

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...

When purchasing a financial product, investors may actively decide upon the risk they take. This paper analyzes the impact of investors' personal characteristics, location-based demographic factors and transaction-specific trading surroundings on their risk taking in the market of speculative...

We use data from a German online brokerage and a survey to show that retail investors sharply reduce risk-taking in response to nearby firm bankruptcies, which are not predictive of returns. The effects on trading are spatially highly concentrated, immediate and not persistent. They seem to...

We relate time-varying aggregate ambiguity (V-VSTOXX) to individual investor trading. We use the trading records of more than 100,000 individual investors from a large German online brokerage from March 2010 to December 2015. We find that an increase in ambiguity is associated with increased...