We study how background health risk affects financial risk-taking. We elicit financial risk-taking behavior of a representative sample of more than 5,000 Germans in five panel waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting variation in local infections across time and space, we find that an...

This paper summarises the process undertaken to develop a much-needed rigorous and theoretically based attitude to risk (ATR) questionnaire for retail investors and documents the results following its application in a large survey. The questionnaire is built upon the strong foundations of...

We examine whether investor sentiment affects hedge fund companies' decision to start new funds. We find significantly more fund inceptions in hot markets than in cold markets. Moreover, funds opened in hot markets exhibit weaker subsequent performance, higher risk of fraud, and shorter...

Do environmental factors affect financial decision-making? And if so, do they have a homogeneous effect on different people? Using plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to fluctuations in temperature over a sample of individuals between 2004 and 2018 across 28 European countries and Israel,...

We study the introduction of robo-advising on a large representative sample of Employee Saving Plans. Differently from many services that fully automate portfolio decisions, our robo-advisor proposes investment and rebalancing strategies, leaving investors free to follow or ignore them. We focus...

Robo-advisors can replace financial advisors and asset managers at low costs. However, human managers and advisors will survive for a number of reasons: First, robo-advisors primarily appeal to a clientele of already financially sophisticated investors, they lack some of the qualities people...

We introduce a training intervention based on a novel tool to mitigate behavior consistent with myopic loss aversion (MLA). We present the results of a large-scale online experiment with 894 student participants. The study featured a two-step debiasing training intervention based on experience...

We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in exposure to the virus and quarantine in Wuhan. Higher exposure leads subjects...

Stock trading apps have encouraged millions of people to begin micro-investing. While there is no doubt that investing is beneficial in the long-run, we demonstrate a downside to the micro-investing trend. Using a novel data set of stock trades from an app-based broker, we show that anchoring...

We study how background health risk affects financial risk-taking. We elicit financial risk-taking behavior of a representative sample of more than 5,000 Germans in five panel waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting variation in local infections across time and space, we find that an...