We analyze the effect of geographic proximity on individual investors' portfolio choice. Using a unique data set which covers the common stockholdings of private households at regional banks in Germany, we document strong and consistent overinvestment in geographically close companies. Our...

During the global financial crisis, stressed market conditions led to skyrocketing corporate bond spreads that could not be explained by conventional modeling approaches. This paper builds on this observation and sheds light on time-variations in the relationship between systematic risk factors...

Using the pandemic as a laboratory, we show that asset markets assign a time- varying price to firms' disaster risk exposure. In 2020 the cross-section of realized and expected stock returns reflected firms' different exposure to the pandemic, as measured by their vulnerability to social...

Periods of economic turmoil distort the ability of stock prices to reflect the available information. In the last three decades, emerging markets experienced numerous crises. The major three of them are the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-1998), Global Financial Crisis (2007-2009) and Global...

Human judgments are systematically affected by various biases and distortions. The main goal of our study is to analyze the effects of five well-documented behavioral biases-namely, the disposition effect, herd behavior, availability heuristic, gambler's fallacy and hot hand fallacy-on the...

Undiversifiable (or systematic risk) has long been an enemy of investors. Many countercyclical strategies have been developed to counter this. However, like all insurance types, these strategies are generally costly to implement, and over time can significantly reduce portfolio returns in long...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

The paper discusses the impact of the financial crisis on macroeconomics and on research into financial markets. The cornerstones of the economic mainstream were made obsolete by actual developments in recent years, and there are now signs that a fundamental paradigm shift is possible. After the...

This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is...

The authors study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough. Upon introducing non-informed agents, the...