These lecture notes are about financial innovations. We ask why are there some innovation and how is an innovative idea realized. This forces us to consider practical and structural aspects (regulations, taxation, markets) as key drivers of innovations and also basic formal aspects in valuation....

Differences between domestic financial systems can lead to international trade. A country with relatively developed or decentralized financial systems will export innovative commodities while a country with less developed and centralized financial systems will export traditional commodities....

While students from more advantageous family backgrounds tend to perform better, it is not clear that they exert more effort compared to those from less advantageous family backgrounds. We build a model of students, schools, and employers to study the interaction of family background and effort...

Human behavior, rational or irrational one, influences one of the most complex markets worldwide: the insurance market. In most situations, insurance markets are not competitive and risk neutral insurers negotiate under asymmetric information with actors who exhibit risk aversion. In this paper...

This paper suggests a behavioral, preference-based definition of loss aversion for decision under risk. This definition is based on the initial intuition of Markowitz [30] and Kahneman and Tversky [19] that most individuals dislike symmetric bets, and that the aversion to such bets increases...

We investigate the influence of overconfidence and risk aversion on individual financial decision making in the experimental asset markets of the Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988) type, with no informational asymmetries. Subjects, based on their pre-experimental overconfidence scores, were...

This paper studies the impact of background risk on the indifference curve. We first study the shape of the indifference curves for the investment with background risk for risk averters, risk seekers, and risk-neutral investors. Thereafter, we study the comparative statics of the change in the...

This paper first extends the theory of almost stochastic dominance (ASD) to the first four orders. We then establish some equivalent relationships for the first four orders of the ASD. Using these results, we prove formally that the ASD definition modified by Tzeng et al.\ (2012) does not...

This paper establishes some equivalent relationships for the first three orders of the almost stochastic dominance (ASD). Using these results, we first prove formally that the ASD definition modified by Tzeng et al. (2012) does not possess any hierarchy property. Thereafter, we conclude that...