Although stock splits seem to be a purely cosmetic event, there exists ample empirical evidence from the United States that stock splits are associated with abnormal returns on both the announcement and the execution day, and additionally with an increase in variance following the ex-day. This...

We consider a financial market model with a large number of interacting agents. Investors are heterogeneous in their expectations about the future evolution of an asset price process. Their current expectation is based on the previous states of their "neighbors" and on a random signal about the...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

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...

We analyze the impact of an individual's tendency to worry on willingness to pay (WTP) for a protective measure. We report on the results of a controlled experiment with real objects at stake. Worry was measured with the Worry Domains Questionnaire, an instrument determining an individual's...

People dislike inflation because inflation erodes the real value of future nominal income and wealth. Adjustment of future nominal values via a cost of living index is an appropriate way to handle the problem of real income risk. Nonetheless an important aspect needs more discussion: If markets...

In this paper we investigate four hypotheses which are inconsistent with expected utility theory, but may well be explained by prospect theory. It deals with framing, the non-linearity of subjective probabilities, the disposition effect, and the correspondence of different experimental risk...

In this paper individual overconfidence within the context of an experimental asset market is investigated. Overall, 72 participants traded one risky asset on six markets of 12 participants each. The results indicate that individuals were not generally overconfident. Moreover, overconfidence was...

This paper presents an analysis of tax clientele effects in the German government bond market from the viewpoint of private investors. The methods developed here allow the identification of bonds that are over-valued from the viewpoint of a certain tax class, the estimation of tax-specific term...