Financial disclosure documents provide investors with product details to facilitate informed investment decisions. We investigate whether the appearance - the visual frame - of disclosure documents impacts risk and return expectations and investment behavior. In our experiment, subjects decide...

Die Situation von Kleinanlegern* auf dem Finanzmarkt ist in Deutschland weitgehend unerforscht. Mit Blick darauf beleuchtet der folgende Beitrag auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse eines qualitativen soziologischen Forschungsprojekts drei wesentliche Dimensionen ihrer Anlagepraxis. Es geht erstens um...

Firms use different instruments to convey product quality in order to counteract market failures due to lack of information on behalf of consumers. We will give a brief overview on the two main types of quality signals. Then an economic model is developed to determine which offers higher...

Between investors and non-investors, we document a substantial gap in the perception of risk. Participants of our online experiment state their expectations of past and future returns, volatility and loss likelihoods. Non-investors overestimate historical loss probabilities more than investors,...

The trend towards Internet self-regulation is driven both by governments that feel reluctant to invest in direct regulation (because of freedom of speech concerns or high costs of monitoring and enforcement) and by the industry that is under the threat of rising public concerns over content...

Die Riester-Rente beziehungsweise die einzelnen Riester-Produkte haben sich seit ihrer Einführung zuungunsten von Sparern verändert. Verträge, die heute abgeschlossen werden, führen oftmals zu einer geringeren Rendite als 2001 vereinbarte Verträge. Insgesamt sind die Renditen aus...

A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) plan is an innovative, complex and increasingly popular form of car finance. Consumers pay a deposit and monthly payments, but instead of paying off the total value of the car, they pay off the depreciation over a specified term. We used an experiment to...

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates...

Reliable estimates of actual household saving rates in New Zealand have proved elusive as existing sources of data have in the past given disparate estimates, making it difficult to reach a consensus of the real rate of household saving. For the first time in New Zealand, however, longitudinal...

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates...