This paper examines the question: Does regulatory approval of prospectuses act as a “certification” of securities offerings? Rational investors should generally ignore prospectus approval due to its being uninformative regarding either the quality of, or motives for, the underlying offering....

Individual investors use advertisements to make investment decisions. We test how advertising content affects investor's knowledgeability and evaluation of an equity offering. The results show that persuasive content (e.g. images) increases investor knowledgeability about fundamental...

This study shows that a group of individual investors in the financial markets displays symptoms of compulsive gambling, or an addiction to trading, based on a standard diagnostic checklist from the American Psychiatric Association. In a representative sample of Dutch retail investors, we find...

Using analysts' stock recommendations this paper shows gender heterogeneity in investment advice. The odds for female financial analysts to issue optimistic recommendations are much lower than the odds for male analysts. However, an investor cannot profit from the observed gender differences....