We examine a range of mental health characteristics (e.g. depression, paranoia, and schizophrenia) in subjects engaged in simulated investment trading, showing that certain abnormal personality characteristics have a statistically significant association with the degree of investment...

Japan's most powerful known earthquake struck at 2:46p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011. We study the unusual trading behaviors of individual and foreign investors in Japan during the aftermath of this natural disaster. Individual investors typically show contrarian trading patterns, so the sharp...

Stocks appear to have investor clienteles based on their business practices and products. The variety in expressive benefits each individual receives from owning controversial stocks causes them to modify their portfolio to accommodate their beliefs. We examine the ownership of firms with social...

Compared to matched conventional mutual funds, socially responsible mutual funds outperform during periods of market crises. This dampening of downside risk comes at the cost of underperforming during non-crisis periods. Investors seeking downside protection would value the asymmetry of these...

We examine the relation between minority shareholder protection laws, ownership concentration, and board independence. Minority shareholder rights is a country-level governance variable. Ownership structure and board composition represent firm-level governance variables. Prior research...

Using brokerage account data from China, we study investment decision making in an emerging market. We find that Chinese investors make poor trading decisions: the stocks they purchase underperform those they sell. We also find that Chinese investors suffer from three behavioral biases: (i) they...

We model the seasonal volatility of stock returns using GARCH specifications and size-sorted portfolios. Estimation results indicate that there are volatility differences between months of the year and that these seasonal volatility patterns are conditional on firm size. Additionally, we find...

Proponents claim that economically targeted investments (ETIs) can earn a prevailing risk-adjusted rate of return while also providing an additional economic benefit to the plan participants. This paper discusses the fallacies in the reasoning behind ETIs. In short, the structure that would make...