One important parameter in the decision process when buying a private annuity is individuals' subjective life expectancy, because it directly infuences the expected rate of return. We examine the market for private annuities in Germany and evaluate potential selection effects based on subjective...

We use changes in Brazil s tax on capital inflows from 2006 to 2011 to test for direct portfolio effects and externalities from capital controls on investor portfolios. The analysis is structured based on information from investor interviews. We find that an increase in Brazil s tax on foreign...

The majority of general equilibrium models of international portfolio holdings differ substantially in their modeling procedures but typically feature a term that captures the relationship between real exchange rate changes and relative, i.e. home vs. foreign, equity market returns. However,...

We analyze spectral risk measures with respect to comparative risk aversion following Arrow (1965) and Pratt (1964) on the one hand, and Ross (1981) on the other hand. The implications for two standard financial decision problems, namely the willingness to pay for insurance and portfolio...

Garbade and Silber (1979) demonstrate that an asset will be liquid if it has (1) low price volatility and (2) a large number of public investors who trade it. Although these results match nicely with common notions of liquidity, one key element is missing: liquidity also depends on (3) an asset...

On 11 March 2015, SUERF jointly organised a conference with the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Austrian Society for Bank Research (Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft - BWG). The present SUERF Study 2015/2 includes a selection of papers based on the authors' contributions to the Vienna...

Foster and Hart proposed an operational measure of riskiness for discrete random variables. We show that their defining equation has no solution for many common continuous distributions. We show how to extend consistently the definition of riskiness to continuous random variables. For many...

This paper sheds new light on the impact of information risk and market stress on herding of institutional traders from both, a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Using numerical simulations of a herd model, we show that buy and sell herding intensity should increase with information...