I explore cross-sectional portfolio performance in a sample containing 324,736 transactions conducted by 16,831 investors at an Internet discount brokerage firm during the period May 1999 to March 2002. On average, investors hold undiversified portfolios, show a strong preference for risk, and...

We investigate whether investors price accruals quality, our proxy for the information risk associated with earnings. Measuring accruals quality (AQ) as the standard deviation of residuals from regressions relating current accruals to cash flows, we find that poorer AQ is associated with larger...

What is the role of "large players" like hedge funds and other highly leveraged institutions in speculative attacks? In recent theoretical work, large players may induce an attack by an early move, providing information to smaller agents. In contrast, many observers argue that large players are...

Several standard components of managerial compensation contracts have been criticized for encouraging managers to manipulate short-term information about the firm, thereby reducing transparency. This includes bonus schemes that encourage earnings smoothing, and option packages that allow...

We investigate how integration of bank ownership across states has affected economic volatility within states. In theory, bank integration could cause higher or lower volatility, depending on whether credit supply or credit demand shocks predominate. In fact, year-to-year fluctuations in a...

Abel (2002) shows that pessimism and doubt in the subjective distribution of the growth rate of consumption reduce the riskfree rate puzzle and the equity premium puzzle. We quantify the amount of pessimism and doubt in survey data on US consumption and income. Individual forecasters are in fact...

We exploit the restrictions of intertemporal portfolio choice in the presence of non-financial income risk to design and implement tests of hedging that use the information contained in the actual portfolio of the investor. We use a unique dataset of Swedish investors with information broken...

Large shareholders may play an important role for firm policies and performance, but identifying an effect empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. However, unlike other blockholders, individuals tend to hold blocks in corporations that are located close...

We find that firms behave remarkably similarly to how their CEOs behave personally when it comes to leverage choices. We start our analysis by compiling a comprehensive sample of home purchases and financings among S&P 1,500 CEOs. Debt financing in a CEO’s most recent home purchase is used as...

Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as a possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children. A related field experiment...