The puzzling evidence of seemingly high momentum returns is related to an understanding ofrisk as a simple covariance. If we consider, however, risk in higher-order statistical moments,momentum returns appear less advantageous.

This study shows that order flow in a foreign exchange market only has permanent price impact if itcomes from certain regions. These regions are – as predicted by the local information hypothesis –centers of political and financial decision making. It is revealing that orders from other...

Using a new data set on investor sentiment we show that institutional and individualsentiment proxy for smart money and noise trader risk, respectively. First, usingbias-adjusted long-horizon regressions, we document that institutional sentiment forecastsstock market returns at intermediate...

The use of technical analysis by financial market professionals is not well understood. Thispaper thus analyzes survey evidence from 692 fund managers in five countries, the vast majorityof whom rely on technical analysis. At a forecasting horizon of weeks, technical analysis isthe most...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in itscurrent form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation ofvoting shares to emerging and...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentivecompatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The surveymeasure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentallyderived risk attitude. This holds...

This paper examines the relative information shares of the Bund, i.e. the ten-year Euro bondfuture contract on German sovereign debt, versus two futures with shorter maturity. We findthat the Bund is most important but does not dominate price discovery. The other contractsalso have relevant –...

This paper examines the puzzlingly high unexploited momentum returns from a new perspective.We analyze characteristics of momentum traders in a sample of 692 fund managers. Wefind that momentum traders are “defined” by their short-term horizon, by a behavioural viewon the market and by a...

This paper examines whether recently introduced “village funds”, one of the largestmicrofinance programs ever implemented, improve access to finance. Village funds areanalyzed in a cross-sectional approach in relation to competing financial institutions. We find,first, that they reach the...

This paper provides evidence on the hypothesis that many behavioral finance patterns are sodeeply rooted in human behavior that they are difficult to overcome by learning. We test thison a target group which has undoubtedly very strong incentives to learn efficient behavior,i.e. fund managers....