We propose a simple measure of investor sophistication based on financial statement experience derived from publicly available EDGAR log data about accounting information acquisition activity. This approach allows us to provide unique empirical evidence for the existence of attention induced...

Using a laboratory experiment, we investigate whether comovement can emerge between two risky assets, despite their fundamentals not being correlated. The ‘Two trees' asset pricing model developed by Cochrane et al. (2007) guides our experimental design and its predictions serve as our source...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

During the last decades several financial market experiments have been conducted to investigate the price bubble formation mechanism and the impact of human behaviour on it. We extend well-established laboratory market models to the two-asset case, accounting at the same time for heterogeneous...

I test whether advertising affects stock prices through an investor attention channel. I use corporate sponsorships of college football bowl games as a natural experiment that provides variation in advertising exposure that is unrelated to firm fundamentals. Sponsoring firms' stocks experience...

We examine how exchange traded funds (ETFs) affect asset pricing, and trade volume in a laboratory asset market. We focus on behavior in secondary markets with or without ETF assets and whether there is zero or negative correlation in asset dividends. In the latter case, the diversification...

This paper examines the effects of superstitious psychology on investors’ decision making in the context of Mercury retrograde, a special astronomical phenomenon meaning “everything going wrong.” Using natural experiments in the Chinese stock market, we find that stock prices fall...

When determining a stock to buy, Strahilevitz et al. (2011) demonstrate that individual investors often repurchase a stock previously traded for a profit as a learning process. When evaluating a decision, people use the most available information that comes to mind. We posit that the most...

We study the effects of the investment horizon on asset price volatility using a Learning to Forecast experiment. We end that, for short investment horizons, participants coordinate on self-fulfilling trend extrapolating predictions. Price deviations are then reinforced and amplified, possibly...