Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

The central issue of this paper is analysis and resulting proposals to help unsophisticated pension participants achieve pension portfolios that match their level of risk aversion when there is a large amount of unexplained heterogeneity in risk aversion. Target date funds are commonly used as...

Pension funds have greater fiduciary responsibilities than mutual funds and are also more severely punished for poor performance. Thus pension funds may find it particularly risky to deviate from peers. Consistent with this view, we find that pension funds herd and that their herding negatively...

Standard pay-as-you-go pension system is facing long-term and short-term sustainability challenges in several countries. Possible replacement of standard pension system might be in a form of private pension savings. Private pension savings are meaningful only if they provide sufficiently high...

We use a unique and comprehensive data set on open-end real estate funds in Germany to study a liquidity crisis that hit this industry between 2005 and 2006. Since this industry is comparably unregulated our data set permits us to contrast competing explanations of liquidity crisis. We find that...

This study shows that weather-based indicators of mood impact perceptions of mispricing and trading decisions of institutional investors. Using survey and disaggregated trade data, we show that relatively cloudier days increase perceived overpricing in individual stocks and the Dow Jones...

This paper quantifies the impact of Robinhood traders on the US equity market. Within a structural model, we estimate retail and institutional demand curves and derive aggregate pricing implications via market clearing. The inelastic nature of institutional demand allows Robinhood traders to...

I study the market for lending and borrowing securities in the United States. I find that by making securities available for borrowing, mutual funds acquire information about short selling, which they exploit for trading. Funds with discretion in their investment choices rebalance their...

This paper contrasts the investment behavior of different financial institutions in debt securities as a response to past returns. For identification, I use unique security-level data from the German Micro-database Securities Holdings Statistics. Banks and investment funds respond in a...

Large-Scale Asset Purchases can impact the price of securities directly, when securities are targeted by the central bank, or indirectly through portfolio re-balancing of private investors. We quantify both the direct and the portfolio re-balancing impact, emphasizing the role of investor...