Fattori e attitudini di rischio nelle scelte di portafoglio delle famiglie

In Chapter 1, I study the earnings process of households as a source of uninsurable risk. I show that education explains part of the heterogeneity in the household earnings process. In particular, the persistence of past earnings is higher among the high-educated, i.e. high-educated households are less vulnerable to earnings shocks, especially the negative ones. Hence, the uninsurable risk implied by earnings is higher for low-educated households. I test these results by comparing the risk premium (measured as a percentage of consumption) of the high- and the low-educated implied by the distribution of the earnings shocks of each group. Estimates show that the low-educated are willing to pay a risk premium twice as high as the high-educated. Chapter 2 focuses on the risk behaviours and attitudes of the household decision-makers and their effects on the portfolio allocation decision process. Using a collective approach, I show that the preferences of both spouses matter in the financial choices. In particular, I approximate the risk tolerance of the household as a weighted average of the decision-makers risk preferences, where the weights represent the bargaining power of each member in the decision process. The empirical estimates reveal that the household comprehensive risk tolerance affects the share of wealth allocated in risky assets only if the household has already decided to hold stocks. Further analysis shows that the proposed collective approach performs better than the standard unitary model, which describes the households as a single decision unit. Last, in Chapter 3 I investigate the role of subjective survival beliefs in individual portfolio decisions. According to the literature, most young agents are pessimistic about their survival probability and become optimistic when they get older. I show that survival expectations are relevant for individual portfolio choices. The higher is the survival optimism of the agents, the longer is the (expected) life horizon. Consequently, also the time horizon of the (potential) investments increases. Then, the individuals (think to) have higher chances to gain from the equity risk premium, which is positive for long periods. The empirical results show a positive relationship between survival optimism and stock market participation, especially among the young agents in the sample.