We present results from the first large-scale international survey on risk preferences, conducted in 45 countries. We show substantial cross-country differences in risk aversion, loss aversion and probability weighting. Moreover, risk attitudes in our sample depend not only on economic...

Previous literature on cash management has revealed that firms hoard cash to protect themselves against external financing constraints that might limit future capital budgeting policies. In a theoretical model based on this finding, we analyze how investors' attitude towards uncertain investment...

Recent studies show that loss probability (LP) is a decisive factor when people evaluate risk of assets in laboratory experiments, suggesting a positive relationship between LP and expected stock returns. This corresponds to the classical "Safety-First" principle. We find empirical support for...

Structured investment products, also known as equity- or index-linked notes, have become immensely popular among retail investors in the last ten years. In this paper, however, we show that for classical rational investors the utility gains from structured products are typically much smaller...

Capital protected products are a special type of structured retail products that guarantee a minimum amount of payment at maturity. They were the earliest type of structured products and are very popular with risk averse investors, but nevertheless have become rare in the past years. Using a...

Time preferences are central to human decision making; therefore, a thorough understanding of their international differences is highly relevant. Previous measurements, however, vary widely in their methodology, from questions answered on the Likert scale to lottery-type questions. We show that...

We present new descriptive evidence on the immigrant-native gap in risk and time preferences in Germany, one of the most preferred host countries for immigration. Using the recent waves of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) dataset, we find that the immigrant-native gap in risk preferences has...

In the past decades, a multitude of judgmental and behavioral biases with regards to financial decision making has been found. But are these biases connected with each other? Are people prone to, e.g., illusion of control, usually also more prone to confirmation or hindsight bias? In this study...