This dissertation consists of three independent papers. The first paper investigates the role of incomplete investor information in financial innovations. We analyze the information that structured product issuers provide to the investors and find that issuers have an information advantage over...

We exploit variation in the ancestries of U.S. equity mutual fund managers to show that ancestry affects portfolio decisions. Controlling for fund firm location, we find that funds overweight stocks from their managers’ ancestral home countries in their non-U.S. portfolio by 132 bps or 20.34%...

This dissertation consists of three independent papers. The third paper proposes an explanation for the empirically documented relation between the value factor and the investment factor of the Fama-French five-factor model: Investors observing that a firm decreases its investment perceive the...

This paper investigates the role of incomplete investor information in financial innovations. By analyzing the information that structured product issuers provide to the investors of those products, we find that issuers have an information advantage over investors regarding two important...