This paper examines the performance of 358 European diversified equity mutual funds controlling for gender differences. Fund performance is evaluated against funds' designated market indices and representative style portfolios. Consistently with previous studies, no significant differences in...

We theoretically show that there is a fundamental disconnect between the disposition effect, i.e., investors’ tendency to sell winning assets too early and losing assets too late, and its common empirical measure, namely a positive difference between the proportion of gains and losses...

This paper explores whether social preferences influence portfolio choices of retail investors. We use administrative investor trading records which we link to decisions of the same investors in experiments with real money at stake. We show that social preferences rather than return expectations...

Actively managed Swedish equity mutual funds outperform the market in 1993-2001 but have negative gross and net excess returns of -0.18 and -1.47 per cent per year in 2002-2013. Across funds, there is no correlation between activism and return in the later period. Returns show little or no...

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis has raised new questions about the relationship between equity fund flows and stock market returns. This paper analyses it using US monthly data over the period 2000:1-2015:08. A VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model with a BEKK representation is estimated, and a...

The recent financial crisis and historical record suggest important lessons about the design of national pension systems. First, wide fluctuation in asset returns makes it hard for well-informed savers to select a saving rate or a sensible investment strategy for DC pensions. Workers who follow...

This paper considers the arguments for fundamental pension reform in Germany and the United States. The two countries have recently made or are considering reforms that would reduce the generosity of the traditional, pay-as-you-go pension system. Some or all of the lost benefits would be...

The determinants of portfolio choice have been studied extensively in the field of household finance. In this paper we study the determinants of the decision to hold risky assets based on a novel dataset of German bank data. Our primary focus is the question whether East Germans differ in their...

We propose a model that delivers endogenous variations in term spreads driven primarily by banks’ portfolio decision and their appetite to bear the risk of maturity transformation. We first show that fluctuations of the future profitability of banks’ portfolios affect their ability to cover...

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...