We provide evidence that people do not consistently incorporate their beliefs into investment decisions. Our experimental findings indicate that selling is considerably less belief-driven than buying. This difference stems from selling decisions in the presence of paper losses for which we...

Assuming a risk-neutral bank and assuming household utility to be exponential, we show how under information symmetry the covariance of income and loan repayments may explain higher household borrowings than in the case without default option. Under ex post information asymmetry and positive...

I study a long-run risk model with non-separable leisure and consumption in the Epstein-Zin preferences to price a cross-section of equity returns over 1948-2011 for the US market. The stochastic discount factor is shown by news on both leisure and consumption. While estimating these two long...

We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors' expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time. These effects are related to how the brain's...

This paper proposes a general equilibrium model which features endogenous cross-country heterogeneity in conditional risk aversion and shows that it can generate significant equity home bias. With complete markets, financing home consumption entails hedging against increases in home conditional...

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively and quantitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the...

Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionally less on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth e ffects on preferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform a structural estimation of a...

We study an optimal portfolio and consumption choice problem of family that combines life insurance of parents who receive deterministic labor income until the fixed time T. We consider utility functions of parents and children separately and assume that parents have uncertain lifetime. If...

We examine the role of political ideology in portfolio formation by studying a unique set of investors whose ideology can be precisely captured by a well-defined, continuous measure and whose personal asset allocation decisions are mandatorily disclosed - namely, the members of the U.S....