This study analyzes the responses to a representative survey of wealth advisors on private wealth management practices, and compares the advisors' views to academic research in household finance. This study demonstrates that many wealth managers do not apply novel insights proposed by financial...

This paper examines investors' retirement savings allocation using a hand-collected dataset on 401(k) plans. We find that 83% of investors in our sample hold only 39% of total assets and follow a return-chasing strategy. In contrast, the remaining 17% of wealthy investors with relatively higher...

This paper brings together the academic literature on individual and institutional investors in order to understand the nature of difficulties faced by them and set the background for the Special Issue. This introductory article and the papers in the Special Issue contribute to the debate on how...

Given its tax-preferential treatment, careful study is warranted to determine whether life insurance can play an important role in an overall retirement portfolio. This study develops hypothetical scenarios for different types of individuals with varying ages and distribution periods, while...

The central role of the media for people's minds and for capital markets has been analyzed by a broad range of literature, nourished from several strands of academic research. Applying a vector autoregression on a unique set of TV news, consumer sentiment and excess flows of mutual funds, I find...

An approach for designing a menu of comprehensive income products for retirement (CIPRs) is proposed and demonstrated. The approach entails for steps: defining and characterising member types based on selected attributes; specifying a utility function to capture the objectives and preferences of...

This paper studies the influence of framing on the relationship between trading in a transparent trading environment (a "scopic regime") and the disposition effect. In principle, the recent literature agrees that social interactions alter investors' disposition effect. However, while some...

Under standard assumptions, both individuals and the government are indifferent between traditional tax-deferred retirement accounts and “front-loaded” (Roth) accounts. When we add investment fees to this benchmark, individuals are still indifferent but the government is not. We estimate...

We examine the investment performance of over 160 thousand U.S. private pension plans. We find significant economies of scale in performance and administrative expenses, which are more prominent for defined benefit (DB) plans than for defined contribution (DC) plans. DC plans outperform...

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...