We investigate whether alternative asset classes should be included in optimal portfolios of the most prominent investor personae in the Behavioral Finance literature, namely, the Cumulative Prospect Theory, the Markowitz and the Loss Averse types of investors. We develop a stochastic spanning...

The asset allocation decision often relies upon correlation estimates arising from short-run data. Short-run correlation estimates may, however, be distorted by frictions. In this paper, we introduce a long-run wavelet-based correlation estimator, distinguishing between long-run common behavior...

This paper finds necessary and sufficient conditions of Nth-order stochastic dominance (SD) for risk aversion and develops linear tests for Nth-order SD. We introduce a linear FDSD (fourth-order SD and decreasing absolute risk aversion SD) test for standard risk aversion. A positive research...

This paper investigates the impact of using different risk-adjusted measures of performance on the evaluation of UK investment trusts. Significant negative skewness is probably the most important empirical property of the time series of returns under analysis. Performance results based on the...

This study investigates whether and how the crisis in 2008/2009 affects households' risk attitudes, subjective risk and return expectations, and planned financial risk taking using the German SAVE study. Households' wealth change from end-2007 to end-2009 is not found to have an effect. However,...

Investors might prefer to consider the problem of minimizing the semivariance of a portfolio given a certain benchmark rather than the variance, as in such case only the downside volatility is considered as risk. However, such optimization framework has received limited attention compared to the...

Using German and US brokerage data we find that investors are more likely to sell speculative stocks trading at a gain. Investors' gain realizations are monotonically increasing in a stock's speculativeness. This translates into a high disposition effect for speculative and a much lower...

The racial/ethnic disparities of risky asset ownership were investigated. In the 2004 and 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances datasets, 30% of Hispanic, 36% of Black, and 65% of White households had high return investments such as stocks, investment real estate, or private business assets. Logistic...

We propose Keynesian utilities as a new class of non-expected utility functions representing the preferences of investors for optimism, defined as the composition of the investor's preferences for risk and her preferences for ambiguity. The optimism or pessimism of Keynesian utilities is...