Newspapers and weekly magazines catering to the investing crowd often rank funds according to the returns generated in the past. Aside from satisfying sheer curiosity, these numbers are probably also the basis on which investors pick a fund to invest in. In this article, we fully characterize...

In 1997, France T‚l‚com, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. The government offered current and prior France T‚l‚com employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of discounts, required holding periods,...

This paper evaluates various explanations for the profitability of momentum strategies documented in Jegadeesh and Titman (1993). The evidence indicates that momentum profits have continued in the 1990's suggesting that the original results were not a product of data snooping bias. The paper...

This article establishes four key findings of the growing literature on experience effects in finance: (1) the long-lasting imprint of past experiences on beliefs and risk taking, (2) recency effects, (3) the domain-specificity of experience effects, and (4) imperviousness to information that is...

This paper documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable...

We study empirical patterns in investment behavior using a comprehensive data set of defined contribution plans. Using plan-level portfolio allocation data for the near universe of 401(k) plans over the period 2009-2019, we document substantial differences in investment behavior across plans....

The three sections of this paper support three related conclusions. First, asset demands with the familiar properties of wealth homogeneity and linearity in expected returns follow as close approximations from expected utility maximizing behavior under the assumptions of constant relative risk...

In the framework of continuous-time finance theory, this paper derives the optimal consumption and portfolio rules for an international investor with constant expenditure shares [alpha, sub j] and constant relative risk aversion [1-gamma] in a dynamic context. The index of value obtained from...

This paper develops behavioral relationships explaining investors' demands for long-term bonds, using three alternative hypotheses about investors' expectations of future bond prices (yields). The results, based on U.S. 'data for six major categories of bond market investors, consistently...