Equity culture has spread among households on both sides of the Atlantic. We analyze the likely changes in behavior of households that enter the stock market in response to arrival of information about how to invest in stocks. Without borrowing constraints, the improved prospects arising from...

This paper studies effects of income-based and collateral borrowing constraints on wealth accumulation andportfolios. We compare unconstrained and constrained behavior for different types of constraints and degrees of tightness.Income-based constraints can reduce or eliminate effects of earnings...

We analyze life-cycle wealth accumulation and portfolio choice under career uncertainty and quantifiable departures from expected utility maximization. Our specification nests expected utility and three types of non-expected utility: 1) Kreps-Porteus preferences which disentangle risk aversion...

Existing findings suggest that standard, frictionless, expected-utility models have difficulty accounting for average and for median holdings of wealth and of risky assets, partly as a result of the largely unexplained limited proportion of stockholders among households. We analyze life-cycle...

This paper describes participation of Cyprus households in various debts using data from the first (1999) Cyprus Survey of Consumer Finances. It complements our previous paper that described household participation in various types of assets (Haliassos et al., 2001). Debts considered encompass...