We find that the aggregate asset allocation decisions of US mutual fund investors depend on economic conditions. Both anticipated economic downturns and periods of turmoil lead investors to direct flow away from risky equity funds and towards lower-risk money market funds. These patterns are...

Corporate sponsors of defined benefit pension plans generally assume low investment risk when they have low funding ratios and high default risk, consistent with the risk management hypothesis. However, for financially distressed sponsors and sponsors that freeze, terminate, or convert defined...

This paper examines the determinants of cross-sectional variation in post-merger mutual fund performance. Mergers between funds with similar management objectives, as reflected by average portfolio book-to-market ratio, price–earnings ratio, beta and market capitalization values, outperform...

This article aims to investigate the similarity of public and private real estate returns and risks over the relatively long horizon using data for the U.S and the U.K. The results show evidence of a one-to-one relationship between publicly traded REIT performance and privately traded direct...

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...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

I show that more comprehensive corporate disclosure reduces investors’ uncertainty about domestic companies’ payoffs at no cost, thereby decreasing investors’ equity home bias toward a country. Since investors should base their investment decisions on valid and easily interpretable company...

This paper argues that a stable broad money demand for the euro area over the period 1980–2011 can be obtained by modelling cross border international portfolio allocation. As a consequence, model-based excess liquidity measures, namely the difference between actual M3 growth (net of the...

We conduct a controlled laboratory experiment where subjects dynamically choose their portfolio allocation between a safe and a risky asset. We first derive analytically the optimal allocation of an expected utility maximizer with HARA utility function. We then fit the experimental choices to...

This paper investigates how best to forecast optimal portfolio weights in the context of a volatility timing strategy. It measures the economic value of a number of methods for forming optimal portfolios on the basis of realized volatility. These include the traditional econometric approach of...