Personal projects, such as a private business or the purchase of a home, influence portfolio choice in two ways. First, financial assets can be used to provide diversification against bad outcomes of personal projects. Second, financial assets can be used to provide liquidity to personal...

Non professional investors display a much higher degree of home bias than fiancial investors suggesting that they might be more severely a¤ected by information asymmetry issues. In particular, non professional investors, having less easily access to information on foreign firm-specific...

The shift of perspective from a national basis to a Euro area basis, inevitably induced by EMU, has led member countries to a parallel shift from equity home bias to equity Euro bias. We interpret this evidence by means of a standard mean-variance portfolio selection model modified in order to...

This paper complements theoretical studies on the Kelly rule in evolutionary finance by studying a Darwinian model of selection and reproduction in which the diversity of investment strategies is maintained through genetic programming. We find that investment strategies which optimize long-term...

In the Full-Scale Optimization approach the complete empirical financial return probability distribution is considered; and the utility maximizing solution is found through numerical optimization. Using a portfolio choice setting of three UK equity indices we identify several utility functions...

How does the age of risk-averse individuals affect investments in private projects? This question is analyzed under the assumption that such individuals have to invest a large fraction of their personal wealth in order to establish a new firm. Thresholds conditional on age that trigger a switch...

We investigate whether acquiring more education when young has long-term effects on risk-taking behavior in financial markets and whether the effects spill over to spouses and children. There is substantial evidence that more educated people are more likely to invest in the stock market....

We extend the classic Merton (1969, 1971) problem that investigates the joint consumption-savings and portfolio-selection problem under capital risk by assuming sophisticated but time-inconsistent agents. We introduce stochastic hyperbolic preferences as in Harris and Laibson (2013) and find...

Decision making under uncertainty is a challenge faced by many decision makers. Stochastic programming is a major tool developed to deal with optimization with uncertainties that has found applications in, e.g. finance, such as asset-liability and bond-portfolio management. Computationally...

This paper tests the effect of background risk on university endowment portfolios, where background risk is defined as the volatility of universities' nonfinancial income. The results show that higher background risk is associated with lower portfolio standard deviations. Universities with...