Many listed companies around the world are controlled by under-diversified family blockholders, who bear idiosyncratic risk in addition to systematic risk. In this paper, we assume that these shareholders require private benefits to compensate for the additional risk. We propose a simple...

Do more intelligent investors take better economic decisions than less intelligent ones? Is risk attitude, in particular risk/loss aversion, linked to cognitive ability? Does an investor’s cognitive ability impact his/her patience? Is financial performance positively linked to investor’s...

In this article, a simple paper-and-pencil experiment, based on lottery bonds, shows that financial decisions taken by participants are inconsistent with the traditional view of economic agents as risk averse expected utility maximizers. First, our results cast doubt on the relevance of variance...

In a recent paper entitled “Putting Risk in its Proper Place”, Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006) established a theorem linking the sign of the n-th derivative of an agent’s utility function to her preferences among pairs of simple lotteries. We characterize these lotteries and show that, in...

We analyze the demand of the Euromillions lottery tickets, a European lotto-like game launched in 2004 and played simultaneously in nine countries with the same rules and the same draws. Using the effective price methodology, we show that price elasticities are very different across countries....