We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

Self-control failure is among the major pathologies (Baumeister et al. (1994)) affecting individual investment decisions but cannot be measured bias-free. We link the time-series of government-controlled tobacco prices to debit/credit card transaction histories to identify smoking as a proxy for...

We study three fundamental components of financial agency settings: Perception and communication of investment profiles, the interaction of agents’ and clients’ preferences, and the role of (non-)monetary incentives. The perception of investment profile terminology is very heterogeneous,...

A value investing strategy consists of purchasing stocks relatively undervalued to their funda-mental values and selling those relatively overvalued. Finding this kind of companies has been one of the most challenging goals for investors throughout the history. The main objective of this paper...

This chapter evaluates the returns of the domestic equity funds of three major American companies: Vanguard, Fidelity, and Dimensional Fund Advisors relative to benchmarks using the Fama-French factors from January 2001 through December 2018. We also present Sharpe's (1992) style analysis...

Every individual should have savings for the old age and the future uncertainties. However as all individuals come from different backgrounds and thus all of them cannot be expected to have knowledge of finance and investment concepts. In such a situation the best investment avenue available is...

Conventional financial theory considers ex-ante that risk, generally measured by the volatility, has to be appropriately rewarded by expected returns. In modern financial markets, there are countless quantitative and systematic strategies which may test and eventually lead to excess returns when...