This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly...

We examine in an experiment the causes, consequences and possible cures of myopic loss aversion (MLA) for investment behaviour under risk. We find that both, investment horizons and feedback frequency contribute almost equally to the effects of MLA. Longer investment horizons and less frequent...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...

We consider the demand for state contingent claims in the presence of a zero-mean, nonhedgeable background risk. An agent is defined to be generalized risk averse if he/she reacts to an increase in background risk by choosing a demand function for contingent claims with a smaller slope. We show...

This paper explores the relationship between the self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their propensity to hold incomplete portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of...

The aim of financial institutions and regulators is to find an effective way to measure the risk profile of different segments of investors. Both economists and psychologists developed several methodologies to elicit and assess individual risk attitude, but these are not perfect and show several...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly...

This paper explores the relationship between self-declared risk aversion of private investors and their willingness to hold diversified portfolios of financial assets. The analysis is based on household survey data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) that provides a reliable measure of...

In this paper we investigate how the experience of stock market shocks, like the COVID-19 crash, influences risk taking behavior. To isolate changes in risk taking from a variety of other confounding factors during stock market crashes, we ran controlled experiments with finance professionals in...