Investment fund managers make asset allocation decisions on behalf of a significant segment of US households. To elucidate the incentives they operate under, as well as the income and career risks they face, we construct a unique and novel dataset, which encompasses detailed information on the...

General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we...

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 build a model of the law of small numbers (LSN)--the incorrect belief that even small samples represent the properties of the underlying population--to study its implications for trading behavior and asset prices. In our model, a belief in the LSN induces investors to expect short-term price...

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...

We survey the growing literature emphasizing the role that supply-and-demand forces play in shaping the term structure of interest rates. Our starting point is the Vayanos and Vila (2009, 2021) model of the term structure of default-free bond yields, which we present in both discrete and...

We estimate financial institutions' portfolio tilts that relate to stocks' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) characteristics. We find ESG-related tilts totaling 6% of the investment industry's assets under management in 2021. ESG tilts are significant at both the extensive margin...

We study sources and implications of undiversified portfolios in a production-based asset pricing model with financial frictions. Households take concentrated positions in a single firm exposed to idiosyncratic shocks because managerial effort requires equity stakes, and because investors gain...

We measure investors' short- and long-term stock-return expectations using both options and survey data. These expectations at different horizons reveal what investors think their own short-term expectations will be in the future, or forward return expectations. While contemporaneous short-term...