Roy Kouwenberg

• Mahidol University

Empirical studies of ambiguity aversion mostly use artificial events such as Ellsberg urns to control for unknown probability beliefs. The present study measures ambiguity attitudes using real-world events in a large sample of investors. We elicit ambiguity aversion and perceived ambiguity for a familiar company stock, a local stock index, a foreig...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many new individual investors globally entered the stock markets, often pursuing speculative investment strategies that resemble gambling. A concern is that trading as a form of gambling can become addictive for some people, as documented by several recent studies in developed markets. We contribute to this literature...

This study conducts a bibliometric analysis and literature review of studies on climate finance. Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, the academic community has paid closer attention to this emerging topic, as witnessed by a sharp increase in the number of publications. Our review lists this field’s most influential publications,...

This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap for those with at least minimum wage earnings. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good ed...

In this paper we test whether weakening the domestic currency can help boost economic growth. To estimate this policy‐relevant but yet complex link, we apply a new mediation analysis to isolate the long‐term growth effects of currency undervaluation induced by active exchange rate management and capital control policies. Using a dataset of 182 coun...

In asset pricing models the exchange rate is the discounted present value of expected economic fundamentals. Engel and West (2005) demonstrate that the well-known weak link between exchange rates and fundamentals, such as money supply, output, inflation and interest rates, is an implication of the model if the discount factor is close to one. Empir...

We test whether probability weighting affects household portfolio choice in a representative survey. On average, people display inverse-S-shaped probability weighting, overweighting low probability events. As theory predicts, probability weighting is positively associated with portfolio underdiversification and significant Sharpe ratio losses. Anal...

This study shows that a group of individual investors in the financial markets displays symptoms of compulsive gambling, or an addiction to trading, based on a standard diagnostic checklist from the American Psychiatric Association. In a representative sample of Dutch retail investors, we find that 4.4% of the investors meet the criteria for compul...

This paper conducts a bibliometric review of global research on the role of boards of directors in corporate governance. Boards of directors play a crucial role in the corporate governance of publicly traded firms, as they monitor the performance of top executives on behalf of shareholders and help to set the firm’s overall strategic direction. Our...

An important question in asset management is how solvency requirements impact the investment strategies of institutional investors. In this paper, we derive the optimal asset allocation of an insurer that minimizes its capital requirement for market risk determined with the Solvency II standard formula, subject to a target return on own funds. Solv...

Exchange rate models with uncertain and incomplete information predict that investors focus on a small set of fundamentals that changes frequently over time. We design a model selection rule that captures the current set of fundamentals that best predicts the exchange rate. Out-of-sample tests show that the forecasts made by this rule significantly...

Experimental studies show that people's risk preferences depend nonlinearly on probabilities, but relatively little is known about how probability weighting inuences investment decisions. In this paper we analyze the portfolio choice problem of investors who maximize rank-dependent utility in a single-period complete market. We prove that investors...

Solvency II is a new risk-based framework for setting the capital requirements of European insurance companies, in force from January 2016. The solvency capital requirement (SCR) is set such that the insurer can meet its obligations over the next 12 months with a probability of at least 99.5%. In this paper we derive expressions for an investment's...

In this paper we analyze how changes in inverse S-shaped probability weighting influence optimal portfolio choice in a rank-dependent utility model. We derive sufficient conditions for the existence of an optimal solution of the investment problem, and then define the notion of a more inverse S-shaped probability weighting function. We show that an...

This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good education. Rather, it seems influenced by countr...

Hedge funds have increased their assets under management rapidly in the last few years, partly owing to increasing inflows from large institutional investors such as pension funds and endowment funds. Not surprisingly hedge funds have also received increasing attention from the academic community. Non-linear factor models and option strategies have...

We develop a tractable method to estimate multiple prior models of decision-making under ambiguity. In a representative sample of the U.S. population, we measure ambiguity attitudes in the gain and loss domains. We find that ambiguity aversion is common for uncertain events of moderate to high likelihood involving gains, but ambiguity seeking preva...

Using a theorem showing that matching probabilities of ambiguous events can capture ambiguity attitudes, we introduce a tractable method for measuring ambiguity attitudes and apply it in a large representative sample. In addition to ambiguity aversion, we confirm an ambiguity component recently found in laboratory studies: a-insensitivity, the tend...

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to finan...

Economic history shows a large number of boom-bust cycles, with the U.S. real estate market as one of the latest examples. Classical economic models have not been able to provide a full explanation for this type of market dynamics. Therefore, we analyze home prices in the U.S. using an alternative approach, a multi-agent complex system. Instead of...

We study how group affiliation, a firm being a member of a business group, affects earnings management around initial public offerings (IPOs) in nine Asian countries. Our empirical evidence shows that Asian IPO issuers tend to manage earnings more aggressively than matching non-IPO firms from the same industry: discretionary accruals are higher by...

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to finan...

Experimental studies show that people's risk preferences depend non-linearly on probabilities, but relatively little is known about how probability weighting influences investment decisions. In this paper we analyze the portfolio choice problem of investors who maximize rank-dependent utility in a single-period complete market. We prove that invest...

The recent housing market boom and bust in the United States illustrates that real estate returns are characterized by short-term positive serial correlation and long-term mean reversion to fundamental values. We develop an econometric model that includes these two components, but with weights that vary dynamically through time depending on recent...

Despite years of study, the impact of firm-level governance on stock returns is not clear, especially in non-U.S. markets. We investigate the returns of governance-based trading strategies in Asia, using bias-free return data and CLSA governance ratings. We argue that poor governance should be associated with higher market risk. We find that a port...

We test the relation between ambiguity aversion and five household portfolio choice puzzles: non-participation, low allocations to equity, home-bias, own-company stock ownership, and portfolio under-diversification. In a representative U.S. household survey, we measure ambiguity aversion using custom-designed questions based on Ellsberg urns. As th...

We apply extreme value theory to assess the tail dependence between three currency crisis measures and 18 economic indicators commonly used for predicting crises. In our pooled sample of 46 countries in the period 1974–2008, we find that nearly all pairs of variables are asymptotically independent: in the limit, extreme values of economic indicator...

We test the relation between firm-level corporate governance and the market reaction to announcements of violations of rules and regulations by Thai listed firms. We find no significant difference in market reaction when firms with high and low governance scores commit violations. We do find a larger negative abnormal return when firms with low pas...

We propose a theoretical framework of exchange rate behavior where investors focus on a subset of economic fundamentals. We …find that any adjustment in the set of predictors used by investors leads to changes in the relation between the exchange rate and fundamentals. We test the validity of this framework via a backward elimination rule which cap...

We measure the ambiguity attitudes of a representative sample of U.S. households using a custom-designed module in the American Life Panel, and we test the relation between ambiguity attitudes and economic behavior. Our results show that ambiguity attitudes vary across people: about half are ambiguity averse, around 10% are ambiguity neutral, and c...

Despite years of study, the impact of firm-level governance on stock returns is not clear, especially in non-U.S. markets. We investigate the returns of governance-based trading strategies in Asia, using bias-free return data and CLSA governance ratings. We argue that poor governance should be associated with higher market risk. We find that a port...

In this paper we develop and estimate a behavioral model with boundedly rational investors for the U.S. housing market. There are two groups of investors, fundamentalists and chartists. Fundamentalists expect the house price to revert to its fundamental value based on rents, while chartists extrapolate past price trends. Investors are allowed to sw...

In recent years, the traditional investment philosophy of defined benefit pension funds has come under pressure. Before the collapse of the tech bubble in 2000 and 2001, pension funds generally invested a large chunk of their port-folio in equities (in some countries as much as 70 per cent) with little regard to the underlying liabilities that they...

We test whether Thai listed firms with higher levels of good governance policy adoption are less likely to violate listing rules and laws designed to protect shareholders. Our results suggest that firms on average implement, substantively as opposed to symbolically, recommended governance policies, as violations occur less frequently among firms wi...

We apply extreme value theory to assess the tail dependence between three currency crises measures and 18 economic indicators commonly used for predicting crises. In our pooled sample of 46 countries in the period 1974-2008, we find that nearly all pairs of variables are asymptotically independent: in the limit, extreme values of economic indicator...

In this paper we empirically test if loss-aversion affects household participation in equity markets, household allocations to equity, and household allocations between mutual funds and individual stocks. Using household survey data, we obtain direct measures of each surveyed household's loss-aversion coefficient from questions involving hypothetic...

Defined benefit pension schemes accumulate assets with the ultimate objective of honoring their obligation to the beneficiaries. Liabilities should be at the center of designing investment policies and serve as the ultimate reference point for evaluating and allocating risks and measuring performance. The goal of the investment policy should be to...

This article studies the impact of heterogeneous loss averse investors on asset prices. In very good states loss averse investors become gradually less risk averse as wealth rises above their reference point, pushing up equity prices. When wealth drops below the reference point the investors become risk seeking and demand for stocks increases drast...

We study how incentive fees and manager’s own investment in the fund affect the investment strategy of hedge fund managers. We find that loss averse managers increase the risk of the fund’s investment strategy with higher incentive fees. However, risk taking is greatly reduced if a substantial amount of the manager’s own money (at least 30%) is in...

Risk budgeting techniques assist funds in making trade-off in a rational way. Risk budgeting is an integrated dynamic risk management process that involves risk measurement, risk attribution, and risk allocation. The process gives valuable insight into the hot spots in the portfolio and the clues for improving the risk-adjusted return. There are va...

In this paper we investigate the impact of a voluntary corporate governance initiative on firm value in an emerging market context. We consider the corporate governance code introduced by the Stock Exchange of Thailand in 2002, applying to all listed firms on a "comply-or-explain" basis. We find that a one standard deviation increase in a firm-leve...

We investigate the link between extreme events on the currency and stock markets for 26 countries by estimating a simultaneous equations probit model, using a sample of 2500 daily returns in the period from 1996 to 2005. In a number of emerging markets that went through a period of crisis an extreme stock market decline increased the probability of...

Over the last few years, Central and East European economies have become more integrated with the West European economy. In general, these economies have become more market-oriented and restrictions on foreign investment have been relaxed. An important step in this development was the admission of eight East European countries to the European Union...

This paper presents a new and high performance solution method for multistage stochastic convex programming. Stochastic programming is a quantitative tool developed in the field of optimization to cope with the problem of decision-making under uncertainty. Among others, stochastic programming has found many applications in finance, such as asset-li...

The return difference between a portfolio of emerging equity markets with low price-to-book (P/B) ratios and a portfolio with high P/B ratios is 33% per year on average in the period 1991-2002. We find that global risk factors, differences in equity market liberalization, size and momentum do not explain this value premium. Exposure to a local macr...

This study extends the classical Gibbons, Ross and Shanken (1989) test for unconditional mean-variance efficiency of a given portfolio under normal returns to account for general linear weight restrictions. With equality restrictions and nonbinding inequality restrictions, the test statistic has a tractable finite sample distribution under both the...

This paper analyzes the optimal investment strategy for loss averse investors, assuming a complete market and general Ito processes for the asset prices. The loss-averse investor follows a partial portfolio insurance strategy. When the investor's planning horizon is short (less than 5 years), he or she considerably reduces the initial portfolio wei...

This paper presents a theoretical study of how incentives affect hedge fund risk and returns and an empirical study of the performance of a large group of operating hedge funds. Most hedge fund managers receive a flat fee plus a share of the returns above a certain benchmark. We investigate how these features of hedge fund fees affect risk taking b...

Our results confirm the profitability of value investing at the country level in emerging markets. A portfolio of countries with low price-to-book ratios significantly outperforms a portfolio of high price-to-book countries. Global risk factors cannot explain this outperformance. We find that the countries in the low priceto -book portfolio on aver...

In this paper, we consider the problem of hedging contingent claims on a stock under transaction costs and stochastic volatility. Extensive research has clearly demonstrated that the volatility of most stocks is not constant over time. As small changes of the volatility can have a major impact on the value of contingent claims, hedging strategies s...

The US economy is arguably following an unsustainable trajectory. The main indicators of this are a large current account deficit, a large federal budget deficit and trend-wise increasing costs of Social Security and Medicare. In this chapter, we will discuss these observations and to what extent the financial and economic crisis may have changed t...

Hedge funds have greatly increased their assets under management in the last decades, partly driven by investments from institutions such as pension funds and endowments funds. This paper considers the added value of an investment in hedge funds from the perspective of a passive investor. The Zurich Hedge Fund Universe is used for the empirical inv...

People are concerned about maintaining purchasing power in times of rising inflation. We formulate investment objectives in terms of real wealth, assuming investors derive utility from the number of goods they can buy with their monetary wealth. We derive closed-form solutions for the portfolio choice problem of constant relative risk averse invest...

"Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street," observed legendary speculator Jesse Livermore. History tells us that periods of major technological innovation are typically accompanied by speculative bubbles as economic agents overreact to genuine advancements in productivity. Excessive run-ups in asset pri...

Value-at-risk (VaR) has become the standard criterion for assessing risk in the financial industry. Given the widespread usage of VaR, it becomes increasingly important to study the effects of VaR based risk management on the prices of stocks and options. We solve a continuous-time asset pricing model, based on Lucas (1978) and Basak and Shapiro (2...

Financial institutions require sophisticated tools for risk management. For company-wide risk management both sides of the balance sheet should be considered, resulting in an integrated asset liability management approach. Stochastic programming models suit these needs well and have already been applied in the eld of asset liability management to i...

Stochastic programming is a powerful modelling paradigm for asset and liability management problems. It incorporates in a common framework multiple correlated sources of risk for both the asset and liability side, takes a long time horizon perspective, accommodates different levels of risk aversion and allows for dynamic portfolio rebalancing while...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) has become the standard criterion for assessing risk in the financial industry. Given the widespread usage of VaR based risk management, it becomes increasingly important to study the effects on the stock market and the option market of these constraints. We therefore introduce a continuous-time asset pricing model, based on Luc...

In this paper we study the impact of earnings announcements on trading volume, open interest and spreads in the stock option market. We find that option volume is higher around announcement days, even if we correct for stock volume and the expected future volatility of stock returns. Results in the pre-event period are different for good and bad ne...

This paper considers dynamic asset allocation in a mean versus downside-risk framework. We derive closed-form solutions for the optimal portfolio weights when returns are lognormally distributed. Moreover, we study the impact of skewed and fat-tailed return distributions. We find that the optimal fraction invested in stocks is V-shaped: at low and...

In this paper we incorporate contingent claims on stocks into stochastic programming models for nancial planning. We propose a scenario generation method that ts the prices of the assets, avoids arbitrage opportunities and is consistent with the current term-structure of implied volatilities. Given this specialized scenario generation method, stoch...

In this paper we study the retirement saving problem from the point of view of a plan sponsor, who makes contribution payments for the future retirement of an employee. The plan sponsor considers the employee's labor income as investment-benchmark in order to ensure the continuation of consumption habits after retirement. We demonstrate that the de...

In this paper, we develop and test scenario generation methods for asset liability management models. We propose a multi-stage stochastic programming model for a Dutch pension fund. Both randomly sampled event trees and event trees fitting the mean and the covariance of the return distribution are used for generating the coefficients of the stochas...

This paper contains a short description of the asset liability model for pension funds that is proposed in Dert (1995). The essential elements of the model, according to the author of this paper, are highlighted. A comparison with other asset liability models from the literature is made. It will be argued that Dert’s model provides the opportunity...

In this paper we develop and estimate a behavioral model with boundedly rational investors for the U.S. housing market. There are two groups of investors, fundamentalists and chartists. Fundamentalists expect the house price to revert to its fundamental value based on rents, while chartists extrapolate past price trends. Investors are allowed to sw...