This paper examines whether policymakers, economists at the Israeli Finance Ministry, act in their personal pension decisions in accordance with the rational behaviour assumptions underlying the pension policies they advance. We find that while economists' decisions regarding three other...

This article explores nonlinearities in the response of speculators' trading activity to price changes in live cattle, corn, and lean hog futures markets. Analyzing weekly data from March 4, 1997 to December 27, 2005, we reject linearity in all of these markets. Using smooth transition...

This paper studies the attitude of non-professional investors towards financial losses and their decisions concerning wealth allocation among consumption, risky, and risk-free financial assets. We employ a two-dimensional utility setting in which both consumption and financial wealth...

This paper investigates dynamically optimal risk-taking by an expected-utility maximizing manager of a hedge fund. We examine the effects of variations on a compensation structure that includes a percentage management fee, a performance incentive for exceeding a specified highwater mark, and...

We develop a panel intensity model, with a time varying latent factor, which captures the influence of unobserved time effects and allows for correlation across individuals. The model is designed to analyze individual trading behavior on the basis of trading activity datasets, which are...

This paper analyzes the relationship between currency price changes and their expectations. Currency price change expectations are derived with the help of different order flow measures, from the trading behavior of investors on OANDA FXTrade, which is an internet trading platform in the foreign...

As a group, market forecasters are egregiously overconfident. In conformity to the dynamic model of overconfidence of Gervais and Odean (2001), successful forecasters have become more overconfident. What's more, more experienced forecasters have learned to be overconfident, and hence are more...

One of Keynes' core issues in his liquidity preference theory is how fundamental uncertainty affects the propensity to hold money as a liquid asset. The paper critically assesses various formal representations of fundamental uncertainty and provides an argument for a more boundedly rational...

This paper examines the relative wealth position and the portfolio choices of immigrants in Germany. The empirical findings reveal significant differences in overall wealth and various wealth components between German natives and immigrants. Differences in real estate constitute the major part...

We use spline interpolation to approximate the subjective cumulative distribution function of an economic agent over the future realization of a continuous (possibly censored) random variable. The method proposed exploits information collected using a small number of probability questions on...