We investigate a novel determinant of financial distress, namely individuals' self-efficacy, or belief that their actions can influence the future. Individuals with high self-efficacy are more likely to take precautions that mitigate adverse financial shocks. They are subsequently less likely to...

An efficient market should not show any anomalies. When new information reaches a market which is efficient, it should automatically translate into prices of assets, which ought to eliminate the possibility of gaining an advantage over other investors, thus preventing excess profits. However,...

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...

We use novel data on individual activity in a sports betting market to study the effect of past performance sequences on individual behavior in a real market. The revelation of fundamental values in this market enables us to disentangle whether behavior is caused by sentiment or by superior...

We propose Keynesian utilities as a new class of non-expected utility functions representing the preferences of investors for optimism, defined as the composition of the investor's preferences for risk and her preferences for ambiguity. The optimism or pessimism of Keynesian utilities is...

We evaluate the income elasticity of the aggregate budget share spent on a sub-group of commodities, in a competitive framework, by a continuum of agents having the same income, but heterogeneous behavior described by an "homothetic preferences scaling factor" having a bounded Pareto...

The paper analyzes the question whether blue-chip stock indices provide a larger degree of internationalization than mid-cap stock indices. The specific focus lies on internationalization of blue-chip versus mid-cap stock indices in France, Germany, and the UK.Methodology/Approach: The dataset...

This paper analyzes three aspects of over-the-counter (OTC) stocks: (1) the recent trends in the OTC stock market structure and size; (2) the documented properties of OTC stocks; and (3) the differences in returns based on investor and stock characteristics. Approximately 10,000 OTC stocks were...

This study investigates the low-price effect on the Polish stock market. By adopting sorting, cross-sectional tests and checks of the monotonic relation, we have examined the performance of the portfolios formed on the prices of over 850 companies listed on the Polish stock market within the...

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....