We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

Since World War II, direct stock ownership by households has largely been replaced by indirect stock ownership by financial institutions. We argue that tax policy is the driving force. Using long time-series from eight countries, we show that the fraction of household ownership decreases with...

Over the life-cycle, wealth holdings tend to be highest in the early part of retirement. The quality of financial decisions among older adults is therefore an important determinant of their financial security during the asset drawdown phase. This paper assesses how financial literacy shapes...

Does economic policy uncertainty affect household stockholding? To answer this question we create a novel measure of household exposure to economic policy uncertainty news by combining survey information on the hours a household spends in reading newspapers and the frequency of such news in the...

This paper reconsiders the effect of investor sentiment on stock prices. Using survey-based sentiment indicators from Germany and the US we confirm previous findings of predictability at intermediate time horizons. The main contribution of our paper is that we also analyze the immediate price...

We study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational and noise-driven components in high-frequency quote processes and their conditional variances. Bid and ask returns are decomposed into a common ("efficient return") factor and two market-side-specific components...