Purpose: Retail investors use information provided by mutual fund rating agencies to make investment decisions. This paper examines whether the ratings provide useful information to retail investors by analyzing the rating migration and closure risk of mutual funds that received Morningstar's...

Ecologically and socially responsible financial products and services are receiving considerable attention in the context of investment management and also in the public debate. While many financial service providers claim to offer ecologically and/or socially responsible financial products...

The authors analyze the impact of individuals' degree of extraversion and neuroticism on their decision making in an experimental asset market. To establish this link between research on experimental asset markets and social psychology the authors use a unique approach that combines a...

Current trends in financial services are characterised by two intertwined developments. First, increasing digitalisation provides opportunities to invest or raise money through channels that have not been available with more traditional financial services. Crowd-investing and social-trading...

Recent years have brought a gradual shift of responsibility for pension provisions, financial planning, health care and various insurances from governmental institutions and firms to individuals. To tackle this challenge, individuals need applied financial literacy and not merely theoretical...

Real-world portfolio composition is often far from being mean-variance optimal. One of the phenomena documented in investment portfolios is the home bias effect, that is, investors hold a higher-than-optimal portion of domestic assets. Analyzing hand-collected data from annual reports of German...

The paper analyzes the question whether blue-chip stock indices provide a larger degree of internationalization than mid-cap stock indices. The specific focus lies on internationalization of blue-chip versus mid-cap stock indices in France, Germany, and the UK.Methodology/Approach: The dataset...

In this paper we analyze whether key investor information documents (KIDs) provided by suppliers/issuers help retail investors to understand the key characteristics of financial products. KIDs are fact sheets composed to describe the characteristics of financial products in a brief, standardized...

We analyze whether the results of the 1980 to 2008 U.S. presidential elections influence the stock market performance of eight industries and we examine factors that are expected to affect firms' stock returns around these elections. Our empirical analysis reflects firms' exposure to government...

We analyze whether differences in market-wide levels of investor personality influence experimental asset market outcomes in terms of price bubbles and levels. We employ a questionnaire to determine investor personality and combine the survey data with data from experimental asset markets. We...