Behavioral finance as a subdiscipline of behavioral economics is finance incorporating findings from psychology and sociology into its theories. Behavioral finance models are usually developed to explain investor behavior or market anomalies when rational models provide no sufficient...

Why should aggregate investment of large conglomerates depend on personal characteristics of one single person, the CEO? In reality, decision processes are complex. Are personal characteristics of all senior managers together perhaps a better predictor of corporate decisions than the CEOs'...

Increasingly, individuals are in charge of their own financial security and are confronted with complex financial instruments. Individuals are supposed, by numerous reforms launched in particular over the last decade, to ever more provide on their own for their protection against potential...

This study offers the unique opportunity to analyze how an unprecedented crisis such as the September 11 tragedy influences expected returns and volatility forecasts of individual investors. Via e-mail, we asked a randomly selected group of individual investors with accounts at a German online...

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors will trade more than rational investors. We directly test this hypothesis by correlating individual overconfidence scores with several measures of trading volume of individual investors. Approximately 3,000 online broker investors were...