Purpose: People often face constraints such as a lack of time or information in taking decisions, which leads them to use heuristics. In these situations, fast and frugal rules may be useful for making adaptive decisions with fewer resources, even if it leads to suboptimal choices. When applied...

Although many papers have examined the Saudi stock market, to date none have explored the influence of religiosity on the behavior of stock prices, taking into account the dominance of individual investors. These characteristics distinguish the Saudi stock market from other mature and immature...

The distinct regulatory design of Indian IPOs permits an empirical evaluation of IPO underpricing models against those that model IPO initial returns as a consequence of overpricing. Characteristics of the Indian bookbuilding process allow us to study the timing and subscription patterns of...

Using a unique data set of complete trade records, we find that large individual investors are successful at picking stocks. Large individual investors' correlated trades not only can move synchronous stock prices but also can positively predict future returns. More importantly, large individual...

We show meetings of investors and firms convey information about expected returns. Investors frequently travel to meet in-person with firms before investing, and we show firms with abnormally frequent meetings predictably outperform firms with abnormally infrequent meetings by roughly 70-to-100...

This paper examines the relation between equity portfolio diversification choices of individual investors and stock returns. Using a six-year panel (1991-96) of individual investors, I find that stocks with less diversified individual investor clientele earn higher returns. A zero cost portfolio...

The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main reason: from investors'...

While Merton (1987) proposes that firm value increases with the number of shareholders, relatively few studies have explicitly sought to identify the factors that affect investor participation per se in equity markets. Using a unique dataset that measures the inflow and outflow of equity...

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...

We investigate the effect of the tone of news on investor stock price expectations and beliefs. In an experimental study we ask subjects to estimate a future stock price for twelve real listed companies. As additional information we provide them with historical stock prices and extracts from...