Should managers, when making investment decisions, follow the signals given by the stock market even if those do not coincide with their own assessments of fundamental value? This paper reviews the theoretical arguments and examines the empirical evidence, constructing and using a new US time...

This paper presents evidence that the corporate stock owned by high income investors appreciates substantially faster than the stock owned by investors with lower incomes. Those with very high incomes enjoy the greatest success on their investments while those with incomes under $20,000 have the...

According to conventional wisdom, annualized volatility of stock returns is lower when computed over long horizons than over short horizons, due to mean reversion induced by return predictability. In contrast, we find that stocks are substantially more volatile over long horizons from an...

We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the "CAPS" website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative about future stock prices. Indeed, a strategy of shorting stocks with a...

This paper shows how lifelong survival-contingent payouts can enhance investor wellbeing in the context of a portfolio choice model which integrates uninsurable labor income and asymmetric mortality expectations. Our model generates optimal asset location patterns indicating how much to hold in...