We study properties of structured financial products optimizing a utility functional of a customer. The conventional method may have the disadvantage that the a priori restriction to a certain number of assets could make it impossible to find the optimal portfolio. So instead of optimizing the...

We present results from the rst large-scale international surveyon risk preferences, conducted in 45 countries. We show substantialcross-country dierences in risk aversion, loss aversion and probabilityweighting. Moreover, risk attitudes in our sample depend not only oneconomic conditions, but...

We study a number of large international military conflicts sinceWorld War II where we establish a news analysis as a proxy for theestimated likelihood that the conflict will result in a war. We findthat in cases when there is a pre-war phase, an increase in the warlikelihood tends to decrease...

Our paper explores the role of time preferences on household debt maturity choice. Wefind that in countries where people are more patient in the long term, planning horizons in householddebt portfolios are significantly longer, as the optimal maturity of loans is considerably higher.The...

We present results from the rst large-scale international surveyon time discounting, conducted in 45 countries. Cross-country varia-tion cannot simply be explained by economic variables such as interestor ination rates. In particular, we nd strong evidence for culturaldierences, as measured by...

We present results from the first large-scale international survey on time discounting, conducted in 45 countries. Cross-country variation cannot simply be explained by economic variables such as interest rates or inflation. In particular, we find strong evidence for cultural differences, as...