This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...

Using detailed data of individual investors, this study shows that, on average, individuals invest more in firms with clear and concise financial disclosures. The results indicate this relation is less pronounced for high frequency trading and financially-literate individuals. The study also...

As opposed to institutional investors, individual investors typically have several investment objectives in mind. The traditional utility maximization approach is not only oversimplified but also may not be suitable for real world application. Behavioral asset allocation divides a portfolio into...

For a long list of investment “biases,” including lack of diversification, excessive trading, and the disposition effect, we find that genetic differences explain up to 45% of the remaining variation across individual investors, after controlling for observable individual characteristics....

We analyze empirically the household financial portfolio allocation decision using a variance decomposition technique that takes into account the constrained, non-normal nature of household portfolio allocation observations. We apply the technique to a relatively wide collection of financial...

Dans cet article, pour etendre la theorie du consommateur a ses choix d'epargne et de placements, on utilise a la fois la theorie usuelle, celle des caracteristiques et celle du raisonnement quantitatif. on en deduit un systeme complet de demandes comprenant simultanement les quantites de biens...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

The large amount of equal division of bequests by parents who otherwise would have compensated the earning differences among their children is attributed to the cost associated with unequal bequests. This paper identifies a source of this cost and explains why equal bequests to children whose...

We examine the relationship between housing equity and wage earnings. We first provide a simple model of wage bargaining where failure leads to both job loss and mortgage default. Moreover, foreclosure generates disutility beyond selling a home. We test this prediction using nine waves of the...

The intersection of the standard altruism hypothesis with the quite strong evidence that bequests tend to be equal suggests that inter-vivos transfers should be strongly compensatory. Yet the available evidence is not in congruence with this implication. It has therefore been inferred that the...