Individual investors’ overall return in stock markets decreases with the increase in trading frequency due to factors such as commission expenses, insider trading, spreads, and institutional investors’ high-frequency algorithms. In this study, the relationship between believing the technical...

We examine how traders react to two prominent stock market regulations. Under a constant fundamental value (FV) process, price limits and trading restrictions significantly reduce the price level and mispricing size when traders are inexperienced. Under a Markov-process FV, there is no evidence...

In this paper I study the information acquisition process in a simple asset pricing model with heterogeneous beliefs about future prices. This is instrumental to investigate the effects of financial literacy on market volatility. I posit that financial literacy affects the cost of acquiring...

Since decades, only one fourth of German households invest in shares. One exception was during the three IPOs from 1996 to 2000 of the Deutsche Telekom, which gave Germans a taste to enter the stock market. However, the fall in the share price shortly after the second IPO, followed by corruption...

Manipulative communications touting stocks are common in capital markets around the world. Although the price distortions created by so-called "pump-and-dump" schemes are well known, little is known about the investors in these frauds. By examining 421 "pump-and-dump" schemes between 2002 and...

We use a large dataset of individual investor stock trades to demonstrate that investors are more likely to sell stocks with larger price changes in the previous day. This is consistent with investors trying to learn about the firms' fundamentals from stock returns. Our core contribution is to...

I document a strong negative relationship between stock market returns and annuitization. Using a novel dataset with more than 103,000 actual payout decisions, I find that positive stock market returns decrease the likelihood of employees choosing an annuity over a lump sum, and vice versa. More...