We use a two-year panel of individual accounts in an S&P 500 index mutual fund to examine the trading and investment behavior of more than 91 thousand investors who have chosen a low-cost, passively managed vehicle for savings. This allows us to characterize investors' heterogeneity in terms of...

We provide an exploratory investigation of mutual funds' investment styles. Funds' styles tend to cluster around a broad market benchmark. When funds deviate from the benchmark they are more likely to favor growth stocks with good past performance. There is some consistency in styles, although...

Poor financial health of intermediaries coincides with low asset prices and high risk premiums. Is this because intermediaries matter for asset prices, or simply because their health correlates with economy-wide risk aversion? In the first case, return predictability should be more pronounced...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

This paper documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable...

We consider an economy in which investors believe dividend growth is predictable, when in reality it is not. We show that these beliefs lead to excess volatility and return predictability. We also show that these beliefs are rational in the face of evidence on dividend growth. We apply this...

We estimate institutional investor preferences based on their proxy voting records in publicly listed Russell 3000 firms. We employ a spatial model of proxy voting, the W-NOMINATE method for scaling legislatures, and map institutional investors onto a left-right dimension based on their votes...

How should long-term investors form portfolios in our time-varying, multifactor and friction-filled world? Two conceptual frameworks may help: looking directly at the stream of payments that a portfolio and payout policy can produce, and including a general equilibrium view of the markets'...

Two competing explanations for why consumers have trouble with financial decisions are gaining momentum. One is that people are financially illiterate since they lack understanding of simple economic concepts and cannot carry out computations such as computing compound interest, which could...