We examine the herd behavior among equity funds in Germany based on a large sample of funds from 2000 to 2009. We show that a large portion of the detected herding can be explained by identical trading among funds of the same investment company. However, we also find statistically significant...

The existence of the momentum effect in stock returns has been documented for the U.S. (e.g., Jegadeesh and Titman, 1993) and many other national equity markets worldwide (e.g., Griffin et al., 2003). However, little is known about the active employment of momentum strategies among institutional...

Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors' local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

This paper investigates if familiarity induced by ambiguity aversion can help explaining the local bias phenomenon among individual investors. Using geographic closeness as a proxy for investor familiarity, we find that investors pull out of (unfamiliar) remote stocks, and pour into (familiar)...

This paper analyzes 700 papers presented at DGF annual meetings in the period from 1996 to 2007. We contribute to the literature in several ways. First, analyzing papers presented at the most important annual finance conference in German-speaking countries offers an unrivaled view on the German...

In this survey, we review the voluminous body of literature on the measurement and the determinants of financial literacy. Wherever possible, we supplement existing findings with recent descriptive evidence of German households' financial literacy levels based on the novel Panel on Household...