This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...

Mutual funds hold 32% of the U.S. equity market and comprise 58% of retirement savings, yet retail investors consistently make poor choices when selecting funds. Theory suggests that poor choices are partially due to mutual fund managers creating unnecessarily complex disclosures and fee...

The central role of the media for people's minds and for capital markets has been analyzed by a broad range of literature, nourished from several strands of academic research. Applying a vector autoregression on a unique set of TV news, consumer sentiment and excess flows of mutual funds, I find...

This paper studies the influence of framing on the relationship between trading in a transparent trading environment (a "scopic regime") and the disposition effect. In principle, the recent literature agrees that social interactions alter investors' disposition effect. However, while some...

We investigate investment flows into more than 5,300 social trading portfolios that are issuedas structured products and are tradable at a regular exchange. We find that investment flowschase past performance. However, in contrast to mutual fund flows, the flow-performancerelation exists nearly...

Opinion leaders of an investment network can have a significant impact on capital markets because their investment decisions are adopted by their peers and trigger large trading cascades, increasing herding behavior and comovement among stock returns. This paper analyzes the interaction-based...

Collectively organized pension plans must increasingly demonstrate that the risk preferences of their members are adequately reflected in the plans' asset allocations. However, whether funds should elicit individual members' risk preferences to achieve this goal, or whether they can rely on...

A common view of retail finance is that conflicts of interest contribute to the high cost of advice. Within a large sample of Canadian financial advisors and their clients, however, we show that advisors typically invest personally just as they advise their clients. Advisors trade frequently,...

This article studies the relationship between giving financial advice and the disposition effect in an online trading environment. Our empirical findings suggest that leader traders are more susceptible to the disposition effect than investors who are not being followed by any other trader....

The paper investigates the importance of inflation-linked annuities to individuals facing inflation risk. Given the investment opportunities in nominal, real, and variable annuities, as well as cash and stocks, we investigate the consumption and investment decisions under two different objective...