Labor votes with its feet-individuals migrate from areas of low wages to areas of higher wages. That has been the traditional view, one that has spawned much policy advice to control migration and to affect the location decisions of migrant laborers. But recent research indicates that portfolio...

In this paper I present a new approach to rural-to-urban migration in developing countries. This approach sheds new light on the role of urban-to-rural remittances in bringing about technological change in the agricultural sector of these countries. At the core of the new approach is a utility...

We study an investment experiment with a representative sample of German households. Respondents invest in a safe asset and a risky asset whose return is tied to the German stock market. Experimental investments correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable external...

We conduct controlled experiments in order to analyze individual trading behavior. Our results suggest that investors measure their gains relative to their initial wealth, and that this reference point together with past stock price changes determine the portfolio choices. Subjects choose a...

The prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) and the cumulative prospect theory of Tversky and Kahneman (1992) are descriptive models for decision making that summarize several violations of the expected utility theory. This paper gives a survey of applications of prospect theory to the...

This paper shows that the framework proposed by Barberis and Huang (2009) to incorporate narrow framing and loss aversion into dynamic models of portfolio choice and asset pricing can be extended to also account for probability weighting and for a value function that is convex on losses and...

This paper examines the effect of a decline in health on the savings and portfolio choice of young, working individuals and the differences between insured and uninsured cohorts using the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that insured individuals are significantly likely...

The direct financial impact of the financial crisis has been to deal a heavy blow to investment-based pensions; many workers lost a substantial portion of their retirement saving. The financial sector implosion produced an economic crisis for the rest of the economy via high unemployment and...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between individual trust in financial institutions and individual access to these institutions. Based on a large-scale survey of savings patterns of Indians, we find that individuals reporting that they do not have access to certain financial...

Under condition of proved by us insolvency of well-known classical trade off theory it becomes important to identify mechanisms for forming the optimal capital structure of a company. This paper presents one of the real such mechanisms based on the decrease of debt cost with leverage, which is...