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...

Stocks, like houses, cars, watches and most other products exude affect, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, admired or despised. Affect plays a role in pricing models of houses, cars and watches but, according to standard financial theory, affect plays no role in pricing of financial assets. We...

Socially responsible investors attempt to integrate their ethical, societal and religious values with their investments. They find it impossible to separate the utilitarian characteristics of an investment, namely its risk and expected returns, from its expressive characteristic of social...

Socially responsible investors are similar to conventional investors in some ways but different in others. Like conventional investors, socially responsible investors want high returns and low risk, but socially responsible investors also want their portfolios to conform to their values, whether...

What do we know about socially responsible investments? What distinguishes socially responsible companies from conventional companies? Should investors expect socially responsible investments to yield higher or lower returns than conventional investments? What has been the performance of...

Do stocks of admired companies yield admirable returns? We study Fortune magazine's annual list of quot;America's Most Admired Companiesquot; and find that stocks of admired companies had lower returns, on average, than stocks of despised companies during the 23 years from April 1983 through...

High market-wide returns make some investors overconfident because they incorrectly attribute the gains to their stock picking talents. Investors who are subject to biased self-attribution increase their trading in subsequent periods in models by Gervais and Odean (2001) and Odean (1998a). We...

Investors who follow different tenets of social responsibility and choose different socially responsible mutual funds can be described as members of different religions. Some social responsibility religions have a single tenet, such as protection of the environment, while other social...

While correlation is the common indicator of the benefits of diversification, it is not a good indicator. This is for three reasons. First, diversifiable risk depends not only on the correlations between stock returns but also on the standard deviations of stock returns. Second, correlation does...

One purpose of this study is to explore the characteristics that define socially responsible companies by comparing the content of the Samp;P 500 Index of conventional companies to the contents of four indexes of socially responsible companies, the Domini 400 Social Index (DS 400 Index), the...