This paper is the first to analyze and value early exercises of Individual Investors in fixed-income investment products. Assuming decision and transaction costs we consider that a continuous decision-making on holding or exercising is not optimal anymore and propose a new approach to modeling...

Mutual fund families are increasingly assigning traders to manage corporate bond mutual funds. Using this setting to study the role of traders in investment management, we document that trader managers identify and exploit short-term trading opportunities at lower transaction costs. These skills...

The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP...