We introduce a simple and highly portable measure capturing the impact of price path visualizations on investor behavior, beliefs, and financial market outcomes: the visual shape score (VSS). The score reflects the degree of convexity of a price path. Although VSS is only a single metric, it...

We establish a direct link between sophisticated investors in the option market, private stock market investors, and the idiosyncratic volatility (IVol) puzzle. To do so, we employ three option-based volatility spreads and attention data from Google Trends. In line with the IVol puzzle, the...

We establish a direct link between the idiosyncratic volatility (IVol) puzzle and the behavior of sophisticated and private investors. To do so, we employ three option-based measures of informed trading and attention data from Google Trends. Our analyses show that the IVol puzzle is particularly...

Since the financial crisis of 2008, risk-free interest rates are at historical lows and even turned negative in some developed countries. We study experimentally how such changes in the interest rate regime affect the risk-taking of individual investors. Keeping the risk premium constant, we...

Experimental evidence shows that recent observations have a stronger impact on the formation of beliefs than observations from the more distant past. Thus, if investors judge upon a stock's attractiveness based on historical return data, they presumably overweight the most recent returns. Based...