According to disposition effect theory, people hold losing investments too long. However, many investors eventually sell at a loss, and little is known about which psychological factors contribute to these capitulation decisions. This study integrates prospect theory, utility maximization...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...

Genaue Prognosen von Absatzmöglichkeiten und Marktpotenzialen für Innovationen können heute ein entscheidender Faktor sein, um sich auf dem Markt zu behaupten. Ein verspäteter Markteintritt kann gravierende Auswirkungen auf den Umsatz und somit auf den Erfolg des Unternehmens haben. Dieser...

We examine within a life-cycle set-up the choice of health and retirement. Health care contributes to a reduction in both mortality, determining the need to accumulate retirement wealth, and in morbidity, determining the disutility of work. The retirement age affects health through the value of...

I develop a heterogenous agent life-cycle model that examines the effects of the US personal bankruptcy law on bankruptcy filings and welfare. In addition to facing uncertainty over their labor income, agents also face wealth shocks that stem from unexpected changes in family composition or from...

This paper discusses consequences of changing economic conditions and job characteristics for individual behaviour by means of addiction. The central assumption is that unwanted high consumption of health damaging goods leads to an income loss. If an individual has decided on his consumption...

Limited attention may play a role in explaining the inability to reach savings goals (Karlan, McConnell, Mullainathan and Zinman, forthcoming). Presuming that attention is a scarce resource and important for the pursuit of saving plans, limits to attention in inter-temporal consumption and...

The presentation analyzes whether the success of persuasive messages depends on an individual's behavioral bias: If at the onset of a savings period saving goals are chosen with over- or underconfidence, i.e. individuals over- or underestimate their savings potential, individuals might save too...

Most decisions concerning (self-)insurance and self-protection have to be taken in situations in which a) the effort exerted precedes the moment uncertainty realises, and b) the probabilities of future states of the world are not perfectly known. By integrating these two characteristics in a...