This introduces the symposium on financial economics.

The present paper reviews two fundamental investing paradigms, which have had a substantial impact on the manner investors tend to develop their own strategies. specifically, the study elaborates on efficient market hypothesis (emh), which, despite remaining most prominent and popular until the...

Previous researches have demonstrated that consumer decisions could be affected by some biases in the supplementary pension field. Decisionmaking is very often not guided by rationality, and in many cases, if forced to choose, people will decide not to decide, passively accepting the decisions...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

Individual responsibility for portfolio construction is a central theme for defined contribution pensions, yet the rise of target-date funds is shifting investment decisions from workers back to employers. A complex choice architecture including automatic enrollment, reenrollment, and fund...

This paper investigates whether mutual fund families acting as trustees of 401(k) plans display favoritism toward their own funds. Using a hand-collected dataset on retirement investment options, we show that poorly-performing funds are less likely to be removed from and more likely to be added...

Do financial advisers undo or reinforce the behavioral biases and misconceptions of their clients? We use an audit methodology where trained auditors meet with financial advisers and present different types of portfolios. These portfolios reflect either biases that are in line with the financial...

Bonuses in the finance sector may be based on too short time intervals for environmental and social factors to be taken into account in investment decisions. We report two experiments to investigate whether investors prefer short-term to long-term bonuses. In Experiment 1 employing 27...

This paper tests the alternative hypotheses of investment selection skills versus overconfidence of equity mutual funds managers in Taiwan. We find that fund holdings’ concentration levels are high and positively related to funds’ risk-adjusted returns in tranquil market periods; however,...

This experiment shows that varying the commission received by financial advisors strongly influences insurance purchase.