We study an investment experiment conducted with a representative sample of German households. Respondents invest in a safe asset and a risky asset whose return is tied to the German stock market. Experimental investments correlate with beliefs about stock market returns and exhibit desirable...

We analyse a long panel of households' stock market beliefs to gain insights into the nature of their expectations formation processes. We classify respondents into one of five groups based on their data and estimate group-wise models of expectations formation. Two of the groups are at opposite...

We conduct field experiments with retail investors recruited from a social trading platform. In our main experiment, we first elicit beliefs about the returns to active investing. We then generate exogenous variation in beliefs by providing treated respondents with information about index funds...

We use payroll data on 1.2 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sector to identify incentive pay in the critical banking segments of treasury/capital market management and investment banking for 66 banks. We document an economically significant correlation of...

We explore the various arguments for and against the recommendation that younger households should invest a larger share of their pension wealth in risky assets. The ability of young agents to compensate their financial losses by saving more during their career provides the strongest argument in...

We define a class of risk-taking-neutral (RTN) background risks. These background risks have the property that they will not alter decisions made with respect to another risk, for individuals with HARA utility. If we wish to compare a decision made with and without some exogenous background...

We study the interplay between tenure decisions, stock market investment and the public social security system. Housing equity not only serves a dual purpose as a consumption good and as an asset, but also provides insurance to buffer various risks in retirement. Our life cycle model captures...

We use hand-collected data of 20,460 investment decisions and two distinct portals to analyze whether investors in equity crowdfunding direct their investments to local firms. In line with agency theory, the results suggest that investors exhibit a local bias, even when we control for family and...

I report historical prices and estimate financial returns to investing in rare books. My sample consists of 25 fiction titles recommended by Clifton Fadiman in his 1960 Lifetime Reading Plan. Relying on prices realized at American and British auction houses between 1975 and 2018, I use hedonic...

In this article, we examine how investor motives affect investment behavior in equity crowdfunding. In particular, we compare the investment behavior of sustainability-oriented with ordinary crowd investors on six leading equity crowdfunding platforms in Austria and Germany and investigate...