This piece provides advice to an aspiring economist about why and how to bring evolutionary thinking into economics and finance. It was written as part of a series, “Advice for an aspiring economist,” for This View of Life. In this series scholars provide their informal perspectives about...

This document provides an overview of the FIN and PEAD factors of Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Sun (2020) and describes their motivations, constructions, and availability. Based on investor psychology, Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Sun (2020) propose a theoretically motivated factor model that augments...

The thoughts and behaviors of financial market participants depend upon adopted cultural traits, including information signals, beliefs, strategies, and folk economic models. Financial traits compete to survive in the human population, and are modified in the process of being transmitted from...

<p>Biased information about the payoffs received by others can drive innovation, risk-taking, and investment booms. We study this cultural phenomenon using a model based on two premises. The first premise is a tendency for large successes, and the actions that lead to them, to be more salient to...</p>

Full paper is available at: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3015582" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3015582Identifying firm connections by shared analyst coverage, we find that a connected-firm (CF) momentum factor generates a monthly alpha of 1.68% (t = 9.67). In spanning regressions, the alphas of...

We derive a separation theorem: investors hold a common risk-adjusted market portfolio regardless of their information sets, and a portfolio based upon their private signals. This implies that investors have non-negligible holdings of assets they know little about, so nonparticipation remains a...

In Chinese culture, certain digits are lucky and others unlucky. We test how such numerological superstition affects financial decision in the China IPO market. We find that the frequency of lucky numerical stock listing codes exceeds what would be expected by chance. Also consistent with...

Drawing on insights of current and past editors of top economics and finance journals, we provide guidelines for reviewers in preparing referee reports and cover letters for journals. Peer review is fundamental to the progress of science and we believe that fundamental changes in reviewing...

Peer review is fundamental to the efficacy of the scientific process. We draw from our experience both as editors, authors and association representatives to provide a set of guidelines for referees in preparing their reports and cover letters to journal editors. While our document is directed...

Behavioral finance studies the application of psychology to finance, with a focus on individual-level cognitive biases. I describe here the sources of judgment and decision biases, how they affect trading and market prices, the role of arbitrage and flows of wealth between more rational and less...