Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...

Using new data for the universe of firms covered in Amadeus, we reconstruct the portfolios of shareholders who hold equity stakes in private and publicly-traded European firms. We find great heterogeneity in the degree of portfolio diversification across large shareholders. Exploiting this...

We examine (i) whether the business practices of Berkshire Hathaway investees are consistent with Warren Buffett's public statements on what constitutes good accounting, governance and investing practices and (ii) whether these practices are associated with Berkshire's initial “selection” or...

In addition to premiums, investment income is one of the two main sources of capital for property-casualty (P/C) insurance companies. This study investigates short-term equity trading behavior of P/C insurers in the United States in 2007 and 2008, and finds that over 27 percent of non-group...

This paper studies the investment returns and asset allocation policies of college and university endowments who share annual performance and asset allocation data with the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) annual endowment study. In this paper, we review...

Topics on behavioral corporate finance are concerned with the consequences ofboundedly rational investors for optimal financial decisions by firm management. Aspects ofbounded rationality are relevant both for the theory and the practice of corporate finance. Onthe one hand, a new kind of...

We apply cumulative prospect theory and hedonic framing to evaluate discountreverse convertibles (DRCs) and reverse convertible bonds (RCBs) as important examples ofstructured products from a boundedly rational investor’s point of view. While commonexpected utility theory would also conclude...

We examine a certain class of new financial instruments which are designed aslotteries on the outcome of prominent sports events like the Soccer World Cup 2006. We areable to explain why there might be a positive demand for such sports-related financialinstruments even if we take riskless...

We extend the continuous Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) by considering piecewise con-tinuous distributions with a finite number of jump discontinuities. Such distributions are rele-vant in practice, for example, within the framework of financial engineering since cash flow distributions of...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...