Do memories of highly emotional stock market crashes permanently affect the investment decisions of households? The Initial Public Offerings of Deutsche Telekom during 1996- 2000 provide an optimal base to address this question, as it is known for its emotional character and is reputedly "the...

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

This paper examines households' self-insurance in financial markets when a rare personal disaster, such as disability or long-term unemployment, may occur during working years. Personal disaster risk alters lifetime ex-ante investment choices, even if most workers will not experience a disaster....

We explore how members of a collective pension scheme can share inflation risks in the absence of suitable financial market instruments. Using intergenerational risk sharing arrangements, risks can be allocated better across the various participants of a collective pension scheme than would be...

This paper investigates the consumption and investment decisions of an individual facing uncertain lifespan and stochastic labor income within a Black-Scholes market framework, A key aspect of our study involves the agent's option to choose when to acquire life insurance for bequest purposes, We...

This paper examines the retirement decision, optimal investment, and consumption strategies under an age-dependent force of mortality. We formulate the optimization problem as a combined stochastic control and optimal stopping problem with a random time horizon, featuring three state variables:...

We investigate the linkage between business cycle convergence and financial portfolio choice for a panel of 18 EU countries. We construct an index of similarity of financial portfolios which we then put into context with the view that 'the financial world' has an impact on business cycles and...

This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of implicit government guarantees of the obligations of government-sponsored enterprises. We construct a model with competitive housing and mortgage markets in which the government provides banks with insurance against aggregate shocks to mortgage...

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has become abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to...