This paper investigates risk‐taking in the liquid portfolios held by a large panel of Swedish twins. We document that the portfolio share invested in risky assets is an increasing and concave function of financial wealth, leading to different risk sensitivities across investors. Human capital, which we estimate directly from individual labor income, also affects risk‐taking positively, while internal habit and expenditure commitments tend to reduce it. Our microfindings lend strong support to decreasing relative risk aversion and habit formation preferences. Furthermore, heterogeneous risk sensitivities across investors help reconcile individual preferences with representative‐agent models.

Using Swedish administrative panel data, we document that workers facing higher left‐tail income risk when equity markets perform poorly have lower portfolio equity share. In line with theory, the relationship between cyclical skewness and stock holdings increases with the share of human capital in a worker's total wealth and vanishes as workers get closer to retirement. Cyclical skewness also predicts portfolio differences within pairs of identical twins. Our findings show that households hedge against correlated tail risks, an important mechanism in asset pricing and portfolio choice models.

This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique data set containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong household-level evidence of active rebalancing, which on average offsets about one-half of idiosyncratic passive variations in the risky asset share. Wealthy, educated investors with better diversified portfolios tend to rebalance more actively. We find some evidence that households rebalance toward a greater risky share as they become richer. We also study the decisions to trade individual assets. Households are more likely to fully sell directly held stocks if those stocks have performed well, and more likely to exit direct stockholding if their stock portfolios have performed well; but these relationships are much weaker for mutual funds, a pattern that is consistent with previous research on the disposition effect among direct stockholders and performance sensitivity among mutual fund investors. When households continue to hold individual assets, however, they rebalance both stocks and mutual funds to offset about one-sixth of the passive variations in individual asset shares. Households rebalance primarily by adjusting purchases of risky assets if their risky portfolios have performed poorly, and by adjusting both fund purchases and full sales of stocks if their risky portfolios have performed well. Finally, the tendency for households to fully sell winning stocks is weaker for wealthy investors with diversified portfolios of individual stocks.

Homeownership is widely stimulated by policy, yet its economic effects are poorly understood. We exploit quasi-random variation in homeownership generated by privatization decisions of municipally owned buildings and use granular data on demographics, income, housing, financial wealth, and debt that allow us to construct high-quality measures of spending. Homeownership causes wealth accumulation via house price appreciation, increases consumption, and improves consumption smoothing across time and states of the world. It increases mobility for young households, who move up the property ladder, and amplifies wealth accumulation for older households, who take more risk in their financial portfolio.

This paper investigates value and growth investing in a large administrative panel of Swedish residents. We show that, over the life cycle, households progressively shift from growth to value as they become older and their balance sheets improve. Furthermore, investors with high human capital and high exposure to macroeconomic risk tilt their portfolios away from value. While several behavioral biases seem evident in the data, the patterns we uncover are overall remarkably consistent with the portfolio implications of risk‐based theories of the value premium.

International audience

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions using comprehensive disaggregated Swedish data. We consider two main sources of inefficiency: underdiversification ("down") and nonparticipation in risky asset markets ("out"). While a few households are very poorly diversified, most Swedish households outperform the Sharpe ratio of their domestic stock index through international diversification. Financially sophisticated households invest more efficiently but also more aggressively, and overall they incur higher return losses from underdiversification. The return cost of nonparticipation is smaller by almost one-half when we take account of the fact that nonparticipants would likely be inefficient investors.

This paper investigates the pricing effects of financial innovation in an economy with endogenous participation and heterogeneous income risks. The introduction of non-redundant assets endogenously modifies the participation set, reduces the covariance between dividends and participants' consumption and thus leads to lower risk premia. In multisector economies, financial innovation spreads across markets through the diversified portfolio of new entrants, and has rich effects on the cross-section of expected returns. The price changes can also lead some investors to leave the markets and give rise to non-degenerate forms of participation turnover. The model is consistent with several features of financial markets over the past few decades: substantial innovation, higher participation, significant turnover in investor composition, improved risk management practices, a slight increase in real interest rates, and a reduction in risk premia.

This paper shows that securities with nonlinear payoff designs can foster household risk‐taking. We demonstrate this effect by exploiting the introduction of capital guarantee products in Sweden between 2002 and 2007. Their fast and broad adoption is associated with an increase in expected financial portfolio returns. The effect is especially strong for households with low‐risk appetite ex ante. These empirical facts are consistent with a life‐cycle model in which households have pessimistic beliefs or preferences combining loss aversion and narrow framing. Our results illustrate how security design can mitigate behavioral biases to increase mean household portfolio returns.