We document a new investor preference we call the home-institution bias. Whereas the home-asset bias is a preference for domestic assets, the home-institution bias is a preference for domestic financial institutions. Our data come from Sweden’s government-mandated retirement system. In...

This paper highlights the role played by overconfidence and risk perception in the risk-taking behaviors of finance professionals. We interviewed 64 high-level professionals and demonstrate that they are overconfident in both the general and the financial domains. Using a recent measure proposed...

The term structure of commodity futures is important information for traders and investors. Traditional term-structure strategies are static; they tend to use the slope of term structure at a given moment. Instead, our trading strategy uses the change of term structure and generates statistically...

Limits to arbitrage play a central role in behavioral finance. They are thought to interfere with arbitrage processes so that security prices can deviate from true values for extended periods of time. We describe a recent financial innovation that allows limits to arbitrage to be sidestepped,...

New theories have emerged over the past 10 years that reveal CEFs to be an important and efficient organizational device. This review surveys the old and current literature on closed-end funds (CEFs) in general and theories of discounts in particular. Among the topics reviewed are liquidity...

This introduces the symposium on financial economics.

This paper provides the first evidence for empirical tests of the effect of rational expectations as well as behavioral biases, including among other animal spirits such as defined by Akerlof and Shiller (2009) on the variability of trading.We have used daily data for five international capital...

In this paper we study the intraday price formation process of country Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We identify specific parts of the US trading day during which Net Asset Values (NAVs), currency rates, premiums and discounts, and the S&P 500 index have special effects on ETF prices, and...

Using the Chinese stock market data from 1997 to 2013, this paper examines the “Sell in May and Go Away” puzzle first identified by Bouman and Jacobsen (2002). We find strong existence of the Sell in May effect, robust to different regression assumptions, industries, and after controlling...

We combine self-collected historical data from 1867 to 1907 with CRSP data from 1926 to 2012, to examine the risk and return over the past 140 years of one of the most popular mechanical trading strategies — momentum. We find that momentum has earned abnormally high risk-adjusted returns — a...