The current global financial and economic crisis highlights the ongoing tug-of-war between those who pull toward free markets and those who pull toward strict regulation of markets - between those who pull toward libertarianism and those who pull toward paternalism. Rising stock markets and...

Stocks, like houses, cars, watches and most other products exude affect, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, admired or despised. Affect plays a role in pricing models of houses, cars and watches but, according to standard financial theory, affect plays no role in pricing of financial assets. We...

Socially responsible investors attempt to integrate their ethical, societal and religious values with their investments. They find it impossible to separate the utilitarian characteristics of an investment, namely its risk and expected returns, from its expressive characteristic of social...

Socially responsible investors are similar to conventional investors in some ways but different in others. Like conventional investors, socially responsible investors want high returns and low risk, but socially responsible investors also want their portfolios to conform to their values, whether...

What do we know about socially responsible investments? What distinguishes socially responsible companies from conventional companies? Should investors expect socially responsible investments to yield higher or lower returns than conventional investments? What has been the performance of...

Do stocks of admired companies yield admirable returns? We study Fortune magazine's annual list of quot;America's Most Admired Companiesquot; and find that stocks of admired companies had lower returns, on average, than stocks of despised companies during the 23 years from April 1983 through...

The purpose of this paper is to explore differences among countries in perceptions of the fairness of trading in financial markets and offer these perceptions as measures of social capital in financial markets. What are the differences in the perceptions of insider trading among different...

Ethics, fairness, trust and freedom from corruption are all parts of social capital and social capital matters in financial markets because investors consider not only their tradeoff between risk and return based on available information but also their trust in the accuracy of information and...

Assets are economically liquid when they can be sold quickly with no loss relative to their fair market value. Assets are quot;mentally liquidquot; when they offer investors options to obscure losses relative to reference prices and options to avoid their realization. Purchase prices are common...

High market-wide returns make some investors overconfident because they incorrectly attribute the gains to their stock picking talents. Investors who are subject to biased self-attribution increase their trading in subsequent periods in models by Gervais and Odean (2001) and Odean (1998a). We...