This paper analyses the relationship between dispositional optimism and stock investments. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Dispositional optimism is found to be a relevant predictor of the ownership of stocks as well as of the share...

I propose a model of cultural transmission where children interact strategically with each other with the only desire to fit in, and parents purposefully socialize their children to their own culture. In the empirical section I estimate parental and peer effects using US teenager data on...