Homophily — individuals' affinity for others like them — is a powerful principle which governs whose opinions they attend to. Using nearly 2,400 advisory meetings, we find that homophily has a significant positive impact on the likelihood of following financial advice. The increased...

Using a unique dataset of over 6,000 clients of a German advisory firm who have received rule-based financial advice on basic retirement provision and the insurance of major life risks, we investigate households' response to advice when the risk of product misselling is effectively minimized....

We examine whether the informativeness of sell-side analyst reports depends on the strength of the regulatory environment of a country and the regulatory background of the institutional investors of a company. Our analyses are based on more than 600,000 analyst reports from 2005 through 2010...