We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

This paper investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known sentiment proxies. We show that this indicator explains the return...

In this paper, we address the question whether the impact of default risk on equity returns depends on the financial system firms operate in. Using an implementation of Merton's option-pricing model for the value of equity to estimate firms' default risk, we construct a factor that measures the...

This paper develops a broad-based sentiment indicator for Germany and investigates whether investor sentiment can explain stock returns on the German stock market. Based on a principal component analysis, we construct a sentiment indicator that condenses information of several well-known...