About 18% of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) members are women, which is well below the percentage of workers who are women around the world. To gain insights into why women represent a relatively low percentage of investment professionals, we survey the 2016 CFA membership, which consists of...

When assessing a fund manager's skill, sophisticated investors will consider all factors (priced and unpriced) that explain cross-sectional variation in fund performance. We investigate which factors investors attend to by analyzing mutual fund flows as a function of recent returns decomposed...

Can the freedom to choose how retirement funds are invested leave workers worse off? Via simulation, we document that choice in stock v. bond allocation and type of equity investments in private accounts leads to lower utility and greater risk of income shortfalls relative to private accounts...

A risk-averse manager's overconfidence makes him less conservative. As a result, it is cheaper for firms to motivate him to pursue valuable risky projects. When compensation endogenously adjusts to reflect outside opportunities, moderate levels of overconfidence lead firms to offer the manager...

We show parental careers differentially affect the future career choices of girls and boys using survey data from CFA Institute members. Among CFA Institute members, women are more likely to have a STEM parent (particularly a STEM mother) than men. Relative to the base rates at which girls and...

We document economically large cross-sectional differences in the before- and after-fee returns earned by speculative traders. We establish this result by focusing on day traders in Taiwan from 1992 to 2006. We argue that these traders are almost certainly speculative traders given their short...

Retail order imbalance positively correlates with returns in the days following trades. However, in aggregate, retail investor trades lose money over these same periods. Why? 1) While order imbalance tests value or equally weight stocks, retail purchases are concentrated in stocks earning large...

We study the influence of financial innovation by fintech brokerages on individual investors’ trading and stock prices. Using data from Robinhood, we find that Robinhood investors engage in more attention-induced trading than other retail investors. For example, Robinhood outages...

We show that mutual fund managers' trading experiences bias their future repurchasing decisions. Specifically, a fund is 17% more likely to repurchase a stock when it previously sold the stock for a gain rather than for a loss. Fund managers still prefer to repurchase stocks they sold for a gain...

Can the freedom to choose how retirement funds are invested leave workers worse off? We analyze social risks of allowing choice, using the Social Security system as an example. Comparing a privatized alternative with the current system via simulation, we document that choice in both equity...