Microeconomic modeling of investors behavior in financial markets and its results crucially depends on assumptions about the mathematical shape of the underlying preference functions as well as their parameterizations. With the purpose to shed some light on the question, which preferences...

This paper investigates market-level and private investor trading patterns and performance around earnings announcements. We document clear evidence for abnormal trading around earnings announcements for both the entire market and households in Germany and observe that private investor...

Manipulative communications touting stocks are common in capital markets around the world. Although the price distortions created by so-called “pump-and-dump” schemes are well known, little is known about the investors in these frauds. By examining 421 “pump-and-dump” schemes between...

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

Based on recent empirical evidence which suggests that as investors gain experience, their investment performance improves, we hypothesize that the specific mechanism through which experience translates into better investment returns is closely related to learning from investment mistakes. To...

We identify flight-to-safety (FTS) days for 23 countries using only stock and bond returns and a model averaging approach. FTS days comprise less than 2% of the sample, and are associated with a 2.7% average bond-equity return differential and significant flows out of equity funds and into...

We relate Google search volumes, proxying for economic concerns of households (FEARS), to individual investor trading. The trading data come from a large German brokerage covering more than 100 thousand investors over ten years. When FEARS is high, individual investors are on the sell side of...

In this paper, we disentangle investor sentiment into two components: mood and household attitudes towards the economy. We apply acoustical analysis to the daily top ten of music downloads in iTunes for Germany to derive a novel and direct measure for mood. We match this novel mood index with...

Drawing on a novel database of the 401(k) plans of 296 firms, we examine the international equity allocations of 3.8 million individuals over the period 2005-2011. We find enormous cross-individual variation, ranging from zero to more than 75%, and strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts...