John Maynard Keynes' activities on the stock market are well known. One company in which he bought stocks was the Hector Whaling Company Ltd., London – a comparatively small and little known company founded in 1928. The director of this company was Rupert Trouton. He had worked with Keynes for...

Decision makers often take risky decisions on the behalf of others rather than for themselves. Competing theoretical models predict both, higher as well as lower levels of risk aversion when taking risk for others, and the experimental evidence is mixed. In our within-subject design, money...

We investigate whether acquiring more education when young has long-term effects on risk-taking behavior in financial markets and whether the effects spill over to spouses and children. There is substantial evidence that more educated people are more likely to invest in the stock market....

We study the investment behaviour of a producer maximizing the present value of his firm over an infinite time horizon and having investments bounded below by zero (irreversibility of capital) and bounded above by his current profit (capital market imperfections). In our model the interest rate,...

Based on large-scale survey data from the 2006-2012 waves of the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) we show that individual portfolio decisions are influenced by a variety of traits and facets traditionally investigated in the field of personality psychology. Two personality traits that taken...

In this paper, we design and field a low-cost, easily-replicable financial education program called “Five Steps,” covering five basic financial planning concepts that relate to retirement. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the overall impact of “Five Steps” on a probability...

Using a unique new data set linking administrative data on investment performance and financial knowledge, we examine whether investors who are more financially knowledgeable earn more on their retirement plan investments, compared to their less sophisticated counterparts. We find that...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the German two-tiered enforcement set-up. The first tier is represented by the private review panel FREP, which has been investigating IFRS financial statements since 2005 and ensures consistent and faithful application of the latter. The German...

We investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women. Apart from a gender difference in risk aversion, gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold more risky assets. Our results show that men tend to be...

A modest approximation by homebuyers leads house prices to display three features that are present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at five-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals....