Do financial advisers undo or reinforce the behavioral biases and misconceptions of their clients? We use an audit methodology where trained auditors meet with financial advisers and present different types of portfolios. These portfolios reflect either biases that are in line with the financial...

Psychological evidence indicates that decision quality declines after an extensive session of decision-making, a phenomenon known as decision fatigue. We study whether decision fatigue affects analysts' judgments. Analysts cover multiple firms and often issue several forecasts in a single day....

Behavioral finance models imply that an increase in shares outstanding leads to a lower stock price for firms with greater diversity in opinion among investors. Information asymmetry models imply that share issues by firms with greater information asymmetries are accompanied by larger share...

This paper investigates the market reaction to the information released in security analyst reports. It shows that the market reacts significantly and positively to changes in recommendation levels, earnings forecasts, and price targets. While changes in price targets and earnings forecasts both...

We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. We find evidence of a "gender punishment gap": following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs relative to male advisers....

Previous research shows that many people seek financial advice from non-experts, and that peer interactions influence financial decisions. We investigate whether such influences are beneficial, harmful, or simply haphazard. In our laboratory experiment, face-to-face communication with a randomly...

We study a decentralized investment problem in which a CIO employs multiple asset managers to implement and execute investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate these funds to the assets in their asset class. This two-step...

Fiduciary duty aims to solve principal-agent problems, and the United States is in the middle of a protracted debate surrounding the merits of extending it to all financial advisers. Leveraging a transaction-level dataset of deferred annuities and state-level variation in common law fiduciary...

We investigate how cognitive ability and financial literacy shape older Americans' demand for financial advice using an experimental module in the 2016 Health and Retirement Study. We show that cognitive ability and financial literacy strongly improve the quality, but not the quantity, of...

Using unique data on Canadian households, we assess the impact of financial advisors on their clients' portfolios. We find that advisors induce their clients to take more risk, thereby raising expected returns. On the other hand, we find limited evidence of customization: advisors direct clients...