We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors' expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time. These effects are related to how the brain's...

We study equilibrium firm-level stock returns in two economies: one in which investors are loss averse over the fluctuations of their stock portfolio and another in which they are loss averse over the fluctuations of individual stocks that they own. Both approaches can shed light on empirical...

Behavioral finance tries to make sense of financial data using models that are based on psychologically accurate assumptions about people's beliefs, preferences, and cognitive limits. I review behavioral finance approaches to understanding asset prices and trading volume, with particular...

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification--NPD) or engage in naïve buying diversification (NBD)--equally balancing values in same-day purchases of multiple assets. We find NBD in purchases of...

People are more willing to bet on their own judgments when they feel skillful or knowledgeable (Heath and Tversky (1991)). We investigate whether this "competence effect" influences trading frequency and home bias. We find that investors who feel competent trade more often and have a more...

In this paper, we find that home bias is still present in all economies and regions, especially in the case of short-term debt securities, but that there are substantial variations among economies and regions in the strength of home bias, with the Eurozone economies, the US, and developing Asia...

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...

Using data on household portfolios and mortgage originations, we find that households residing in a city with few publicly traded firms headquartered there are more likely to own an investment home nearby. Households in these areas are also less likely to own stocks. This only-game-in-town...

Whether, and to what extent, behavioral anomalies uncovered in the lab manifest themselves in the field remains of first order importance in finance and economics. We begin by examining behavior of retail traders/investors making investment decisions in constructed laboratory markets. Our...