Existing studies of household stock trading using administrative data offer conflicting results: discount brokerage accounts exhibit excessive trading, while retirement accounts show inactivity. This paper uses population-wide data from PSID and SCF to examine the overall extent of household...

We study how the introduction of a defined contribution market based retirement system affects the propensity of the investor to participate in the stock market. By using data on the quot;Swedish experimentquot;, we focus on the decision to invest directly in stocks and we see how it changes...

We study the impact of menu representation on portfolio choice and we show that investors choose assets as a function of the way they are represented in the menu available to them. We use the choices of mutual funds for retirement accounts of the Swedish population. We show that investors prefer...

Using a large sample of US active equity mutual funds from 1983 to 2001, we show that portfolio liquidity is actively managed and chosen as a function of the multiple liquidity needs a fund has. Using portfolio liquidity as a parsimonious proxy for the severity of liquidity needs, we find that...

We study the link between social interaction and stock market bubbles. We argue that an increase in social interaction may facilitate the birth of a cascade-type pattern and indirectly of a bubble. We concentrate on a form of interaction that is rooted back in the past: college-based interaction...

We study the link between portfolio choice and different college-based interaction - defined as the one that relates the portfolio choice of an investor to that of the other investors who went to the same college. We explain it in terms of a common cultural imprinting and the development of...

We study the puzzle of portfolio underdiversification and proximity investment from a novel perspective, linking it to the process of urbanism. We find that urban portfolios are more focused - i.e., less diversified and more concentrated in quot;closequot; stocks - than urban portfolios. We...

We investigate the way investors react to prior gains/losses and the so called quot;familiarityquot; bias. We use a new and unique dataset with detailed information on investors' various components of wealth, income, demographic characteristics and portfolio holdings identified at the stock...

Is wider access to stockholding opportunities related to reduced wealth inequality, given that it creates challenges for small and less sophisticated investors? Counterfactual analysis is used to study the influence of changes in the US stockholder pool and economic environment, on the...

This paper investigates the role of skewness preference in cross-sectional pricing of NYSE, AMEX, and NASDAQ stocks over the long sample period of January 1926-December 2005 as well as two subsamples. Portfolio-level analyses and the firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and...