The question whether European Monetary Union should include all the EC countries from the start or should initially be limited to a few core countries is again being discussed more intensely. What advantages would a small EMU have from an economic point of view? Which countries should be its...

The United Nations Development Program has published its Human Development Index values for most countries of the world for the past five years. It claims the index provides information that goes beyond the widely-used GDP data and is relevant for policy-making. Critical examination shows that...

In vielen Ländern der Welt, Deutschland eingeschlossen, sind Finanzberater (hier Personen, die Privatanleger bei Finanzanlagen beraten) heutzutage gesetzlich verpflichtet, die Risikoeinstellung ihrer Kunden zu erfassen, um ihnen dabei zu helfen, die passendste Anlageentscheidung zu treffen. Die...

This research studies the stylized fact of a "gender gap" in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men's low financial literacy, nor by women's high income and...

The debt crisis of the developing countries, which loomed so large at the beginning of the eighties, appears for the time being to have been overcome. However, under the surface problems are growing that could give a debt crisis among the developing countries an entirely new dimension. Under...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they robustly explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

We show that technical indicators deliver economic value in predicting the U.S. equity premium. A crucial element of this value stems from the stability of return predictability over the full sample period from 1950 to 2013. Results tentatively improve over time and beat alternatives over...