Over the past two decades, respondents to the Shiller Investor Confidence Surveys assess the probability of a catastrophic stock market crash to be much higher that the historical frequency of such events. We decompose these crash probabilities into fundamental and subjective components and use...

The financial press is a conduit for popular narratives that reflect collective memory about historical events. Some collective memories relate to major stock market crashes, and investors may rely on associated narratives, or "crash narratives," to inform current beliefs and choices. Using...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...

"This paper studies how portfolios with a global investment scope are actually allocated internationally using a unique micro dataset on U.S. equity mutual funds. While mutual funds have great flexibility to invest globally, they invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks, around 100. The...

This paper studies how portfolios with a global investment scope are actually allocated internationally using a unique micro dataset on U.S. equity mutual funds. While mutual funds have great flexibility to invest globally, they invest in a surprisingly limited number of stocks, around 100. The...

We provide new empirical evidence suggesting that the marginal investor in mutual funds behaves differently across market conditions. If the marginal investor allocates capital across mutual funds rationally, then the relative performance of funds should be unpredictable. We find however that...

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we...

We use mutual fund flows as a measure for individual investor sentiment for different stocks, and find that high sentiment predicts low future returns at long horizons. Fund flows are dumb money -- by reallocating across different mutual funds, retail investors reduce their wealth in the long...

A mutual-fund manager is more likely to hold (or buy, or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers in the same city are holding (or buying, or selling) that same stock. This pattern shows up even when controlling for the distance between the fund manager and the stock in...

This paper examines the proposition that fluctuations in discounts on closed end funds are driven by changes in individual investor sentiment toward closed end funds and other securities. The theory implies that discounts on various funds must move together, that new funds get started when...