We examine the effect of behavioral biases on the mutual fund choices of a large sample of U.S. discount brokerage investors using new measures of attention to news, tax awareness, and fund-level familiarity bias, in addition to behavioral and demographic characteristics of earlier studies....

This paper examines whether political activism increases people's propensity to participate in the stock market. Our key conjecture is that politically active people follow political news more actively, which increases their chance of being exposed to financial news. Consequently, their...

This study investigates whether geographic variation in religion-induced gambling norms affects aggregate market outcomes. We conjecture that gambling propensity would be stronger in regions with higher concentrations of Catholics relative to Protestants. Consistent with our conjecture, we show...

We examine whether the decision to participate in the stock market and other related portfolio decisions are influenced by income hedging motives. Economic theory predicts that the market participation propensity should increase as the correlation between income growth and stock market returns...

In this paper, we examine if the diversification decisions of individual investors influence asset prices. First, we show that a vast majority of individual investors in our sample are under-diversified and the unexpectedly high idiosyncratic risk in their portfolios results in a welfare loss -...

I analyze the behavior of a group of investment newsletters that provide explicit recommendations about the fractions of investment holding that should be allocated to risky and riskless asset classes. I find that the group of newsletters exhibit few types of simple behaviors and a majority of...

In this paper we examine the portfolios of more than 40,000 equity investment accounts from a large discount brokerage during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. Using the historical performance for the equities in these accounts, we find that a vast majority of...

We analyze the impact of price trends on trading decisions of more than 40,000 households with accounts at a major discount brokerage house and find that buying and selling decisions of investors in our sample are influenced by short-term (less than 3 months) price trends. We examine investor...

In this paper we examine the portfolios of more than 40,000 equity investment accounts from a large discount brokerage during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. Using the historical performance for the equities in these accounts, we find that a vast majority of...

This study analyzes the behavior and performance of 353 investment newsletters that make asset allocation recommendations during a period covering more than 21 years (June 1980 - November 2001). Newsletters change their asset mix between equity and cash using relatively simple rules that are...