This paper provides a descriptive analysis of wealth ownership and wealth inequality in Latin American countries, using diverse published sources and primary data analysis for 16 nations. We produce estimates of the distribution of home ownership, land, and financial assets, and find very high...

This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets,...

Systematic information on household financial asset holdings in developing countries is very sparse; we review some available data and current policy debates. Although financial asset holdings by households are highly concentrated, deeper financial systems are correlated with improved income...

Households can rely on private savings or on public unemployment insurance to hedge against the risk of becoming unemployed. These hedging mechanisms are used differently across countries. In this paper, we use a life cycle model to study the effects of unemployment on the portfolio choice of...

This paper investigates the long-term impact of price-level targeting on social welfare in an overlapping generations model in which the young save for old age by investing in productive capital and indexed and nominal government bonds. A key feature of the model is that the extent of bond...

I introduce behavioral asset pricing rules into a wider dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework. Asset price bubbles emerge endogenously within the model. I find that in this model the only monetary policy that would be likely to enhance welfare is a counter-intuitive running with the...

I construct a behavioral model of asset pricing in which agents choose whether to base their expectations on chartist or fundamental forecasts. I simulate the model in order to test its efficacy in explaining the moments and time series properties of the FTSE All-Share index, and find that the...

The study investigates the mutual funds investment style in the Jordanian context. It uses monthly returns of five mutual funds from July 2000 to December 2009. To do so, it employs the 4-factors model with explanatory variables the market portfolio return, a small minus large capitalization...

We define a class of risk-taking-neutral (RTN) background risks. These background risks have the property that they will not alter decisions made with respect to another risk, for individuals with HARA utility. If we wish to compare a decision made with and without some exogenous background...