One explanation for overpricing on asset markets is a lack of traders' self-control. Self-control is the individual capacity to override or inhibit undesired impulses that may drive prices. We implement the first experiment to address the causal relationship between self-control abilities and...

Institutional funds have concentrated ownership by a few institutional investors, infrequent outflows and essentially no leverage. Yet using unique granular data on the bond holdings of institutional funds, we show that their trading behavior is strongly procyclical: they actively move into...

Using a unique data set on German banks' sector specific loan exposures to the real economy and the corresponding write-offs and write-downs, we examine the impact of loan portfolio sector concentration on credit risk. By controlling for common risk factors, we separate the bank-specific...

We develop a portfolio balance model to analyze the impact of euro area quantitative easing (QE) on asset yields. Our model features two countries each populated by two agents representing their respective banking and mututal fund sectors. Agents, which differ in their preferences for assets,...

The beta dispersion, which is the spread of betas on a stock market, can be interpreted as a measure of market vulnerability. This study examines the economic idea of the beta dispersion and its application as a market return predictor. Based on the empirical beta dispersion observed in the US...

We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in...

Mutual funds' exposure to corporate bonds has brought concerns about risks arising from liquidity transformation back to the fore. With a focus on fund asset liquidity and investors, this paper explores the flow-performance relationship and the liquidity management of funds in the presence of...

Banks lend more to banks that are similar to them. Using data from the German credit register and proprietary supervisory data on the quality of banks’ loan portfolio, we show that a similar portfolio of the lending and borrowing bank helps to overcome information asymmetries in interbank...

This article studies long-horizon dynamic asset allocation strategies with recursive parameter updating. The parameter estimates for the regime-switching dynamics vary as more and more datapoints are observed and the sample size increases. In such a setting, the globally optimal portfolio...

We analyze the dispersion of month-end price marks simultaneously placed on identical corporate bonds by different US mutual fund managers before and after initiations of TRACE and introductions of issuers into Markit’s CDS database. Disseminated bonds show large and statistically significant...