Safe Haven Assets and Investor Behaviour Under Uncertainty

We study two different safe haven assets, US government bonds and gold, and examine how the price changes of these assets can be used to infer investor behaviour under uncertainty. We find that investors are ambiguity-averse, that is they buy gold when faced with extreme uncertainty about the state of the economy or thefinancial system and when they receive ambiguous signals. In contrast, investors buyUS government bonds when faced with extreme but unambiguous signals. We also show that there is overreaction to ambiguous signals.