Using representative US investor data, we investigate whether automated financial advisors, also referred to as robo-advisors, reduce investors' demand for human financial advice offered by financial service providers. Our results provide a strong negative relationship between using...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

We employ a novel brokerage account dataset to investigate which individual investors are the most attentive, how investors allocate their attention, and the relation between investor attention and performance. Attention is positively related to investment performance, both at the portfolio...

Large, unpredictable and not fully insurable health-care costs represent a source of background risk that might deter households' financial risk taking. Using panel data from the Health and Retirement Study and fixed-effects estimation, we test whether universal health insurance, like Medicare...

Analysing the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we present a new empirical method to investigate the extent to which households reduce their financial risk exposure when confronted with background risk. Our novel modelling approach – termed a deflated fractional ordered probit model –...

We show that household heads with a strong internal economic locus of control are more likely to hold equity and hold a larger share of equity in their investment portfolio. This relation holds when we control for economic preferences and possible confounders such as financial literacy,...

In this note we make use of theAverage Internal Rate of Return (AIRR) approach, first introduced in Magni (2010), to introduce a pair of metrics, opposed to IRR and TWRR, which measure the manager's performance and the investor's performance on the basis of the market values of the fund. We also...

This paper examines the link between marital decisions, consumption, and optimal portfolio choice in a life-cycle model with limited marital commitment. Without full commitment, individual income shocks lead to renegotiation between spouses, altering relative bargaining power and endogenously...

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. We offer an explanation for this violation of the Law of One Price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case...

This study examines household portfolio choice through the retirement transition. I show that couples significantly decrease their stock allocations after retirement, whereas singles' allocations remain relatively unchanged. Reallocations are concentrated among couples in which the wife is more...