We investigate the connection between corporate governance system configurations and the role of intermediaries in the respective systems from a informational perspective. Building on the economics of information we show that it is meaningful to distinguish between internalisation and...

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...