Housing data from the last 25 years show that returns to residential real estate in the U.S. can be volatile and vary significantly among locations. The variations in returns are driven by economically as well as geographically and psychologically motivated factors, but so far, no asset pricing...

This paper examines how cross-cultural differences influence institutional investors' trading frequency within their own portfolio. We find evidence that as cultural distance between the investors and their stock holdings increases, institutions trade with lower frequency. Findings are...

The purpose of this paper is to study the closed-end fund discount in Miller's (1977) framework. Miller's theory states that in the simultaneous presence of (1) short sale restrictions and (2) dispersion of investors' opinions, securities become overvalued. We show that discounts of...

This paper examines foreign institutional investors’ portfolio allocation and performance in US securities. We test how information immobility, proxied by information barriers between the investors’ home markets and the US, influences portfolio strategies. Consistent with theoretical...

The use of research and development (R&D) spending as an empirical proxy for managerial discretion, information asymmetry and growth opportunities, is pervasive in empirical corporate finance research. Underlying this is the implicit assumption that firms choose levels of R&D to maximize value,...

We investigate determinants of international diversification in institutionally managed portfolios from more than 60 countries. Survey-based country-specific variables on cross-cultural behaviors help to explain both home bias and diversification among foreign equities. In particular, investment...

This paper examines foreign institutional investors' portfolio allocation and performance in US securities. We test how information immobility, proxied by cultural and geographical distance between the investors' home markets and the US, influences portfolio strategies. Consistent with...

While true underlying home values are expected to be randomly distributed, actual residential listing prices tend to be highly clustered. Particularly, more than 75 % of the homes in our sample are associated with a round or “just below” round asking price. This study provides a theoretical...

Recent studies report that U.S. firms headquartered near each other experience positive comovement in their stock returns, a finding suggestive of local biases in equity trading activity. We investigate the robustness of these findings and find that including additional pricing factors in models...