Analysis of required expected return disclosures by public pension funds in individual asset classes reveals a reliance on past performance in setting return expectations. These extrapolative expectations operate through the expected risk premium and occur across all risky asset classes. Pension...

This paper studies the effect of new fund flows on investment behavior and the resulting equilibrium price of risk. The Small Fund Industry model shows equilibria with overinvestment in unprofitable and underinvestment in profitable investment opportunities. The Large Fund Industry model derives...

We document evidence consistent with retail day traders in the Forex market attributing random success to their own skill and, as a consequence, increasing risk taking. Although past performance does not predict future success for these traders, traders increase trade sizes, trade size...

The present study explores the effect of the gambler’s fallacy on stock trading volumes. I hypothesize that if a stock’s price rises (falls) during a number of consecutive trading days, then the gambler’s fallacy may cause at least some of the investors to expect that the stock’s price...

Individual investors trade excessively, sell winners too soon, and overweight stocks with lottery features and low expected returns. This paper proposes and models a financial innovation, called stock loan lotteries, that improves individual investor performance. An individual investor signs a...

This study analyses how investors' educational characteristics affect their trading activity on the stock market. It uses a unique dataset from the Tallinn Stock Exchange, covering all transactions of a full business cycle from 2004 to 2012, along with a dataset containing the official...

This paper investigates how the stock market reacts to firm level liquidity shocks. We find that negative and persistent liquidity shocks not only lead to lower contemporaneous returns, but also predict negative returns for up to six months in the future. Long-short portfolios sorted on past...

This experimental study investigates the impact of affective attitudes on risk and return estimates of stocks. Participants rate well-known blue-chip firms on an affective scale and forecast risk and return of the firms' stock. We find that positive affective attitudes lead to a prediction of...

Investors' perception of performance is biased because the relevant measure, returns, is rarely displayed. Major indices ignore dividends, inducing mechanical underperformance on ex-dividend days. Newspapers are more pessimistic on these days, consistent with mistaking the index for a return....

We examine whether initial returns influence investors' decisions to return to the stock market following withdrawal. Using a survival analysis technique to estimate Finnish retail investors' likelihood of stock market re-entry reveals that investors who experience lower initial returns are less...