We document a new investor preference we call the home-institution bias. Whereas the home-asset bias is a preference for domestic assets, the home-institution bias is a preference for domestic financial institutions. Our data come from Sweden’s government-mandated retirement system. In...

Ambiguity aversion has been suggested as a potential explanation for the equity premium puzzle in recent theoretical models. To test this hypothesis, we measure the amount of ambiguity aversion in a large-scale international survey. A comparison to the average equity premia in these countries...

Following the crisis, the world and investors perception changed. The paper tries to highlight a few key dimensions of the FDI downturn impact on job creation in Europe in crisis and global recession. In this approach are analyzed changes in geographical and sectoral orientation of foreign...

Pension fund returns can be decomposed into different sources, including market movements, asset allocation policy, and active portfolio management. We use a unique database covering the asset allocations of US defined-benefit pension funds for the period 1990-2008, and we test the role of each...

Despite a large and growing theoretical literature on flights to safety, there does not appear to exist an empirical characterization of flight-to-safety (FTS) episodes. Using only data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety episodes for 23 countries. On...

Closed-end ship funds (KG-funds) have been an important form of capital investment for private investors for many years. They also represented the most successful financing instrument of German tramp ship-owners in the past. In spite of their great importance for the economy overall, closed-end...

In order to explain equity returns, the single index model (which corresponds to the CAPM) was extended in various ways to multi-factor models. Following Chen/ Roll/Ross, macroeconomic variables are the favorites for the additional factors. Fama/French (1993–1998) use the return of specially...

This article is about individualising the process of giving advice to a retail customer in the field of asset allocation. With regard to this process, two main contributions are made by answering two questions. First, which objectives are relevant for a customer (beyond return and risk) and...

Risk free asset demand in the classic portfolio problem is shown to decrease with income if and only if the consumer's uncertainty preferences over assets satisfy the preference condition that the risk free asset is more readily substituted for the risky asset as the quantity of the latter...

We find that wealthier and more educated immigrants are more likely to make use of basic banking services and other formal financial services. Holding these (and other) factors constant, we find immigrants from countries with more effective institutions are more likely to have a relationship...