We use cross-country microdata and counterfactual methods to document international differences in ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among older households in thirteen countries. We decompose these differences into two parts, related to population...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

We introduce a new, hybrid measure of stock return tail covariance risk, motivated by the under-diversified portfolio holdings of individual investors, and investigate its cross-sectional predictive power. Our key innovation is that this covariance is measured across the left tail states of the...

This paper investigates how the stock market reacts to firm level liquidity shocks. We find that negative and persistent liquidity shocks not only lead to lower contemporaneous returns, but also predict negative returns for up to six months in the future. Long-short portfolios sorted on past...

We investigate US households’ direct investment in stocks, bonds and liquid accounts and their foreign counterparts, in order to identify the different participation hurdles affecting asset investment domestically and overseas. To this end, we estimate a trivariate probit model with three...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime crisis, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey, representative of the...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

We revisit the apparent historical success of technical trading rules on daily prices of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1897 to 2011, and we use the false discovery rate (FDR) as a new approach to data snooping. The advantage of the FDR over existing methods is that it selects more...