When analyzing options returns, most papers tend to focus on the expected and realized return from strategies where the investors are long on those financial instruments. We conduct a test searching for excess returns on passive options investment strategies resorting to a four factor model,...

In the presence of conditional charity, universities must undertake costly revenue raising to qualify as prospective recipients of private donations. This paper considers the donation portfolios of U.S. universities between 2003 and 2014 to investigate whether a strategy that includes beliefs...

Under the context of the US and EMU financial and debt crisis we investigate the portfolio asset diversification and assess risk for a core pool of advanced (US/Eurozone/UK/Japan) markets enriched by emerging financial markets represented by BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Specifically we...

A defined contribution pension plan allows consumption to be redistributed from the plan member's working life to retirement in a manner that is consistent with the member's personal preferences. The plan's optimal funding and investment strategies therefore depend on the desired profile of...

Decisions in the stock markets are made by individuals and influenced by financial sophistication and emotions. Accordingly, the current study investigates the impact of financial sophistication and emotional quotient on stock market participation. Empirical results demonstrated a positive...

We utilize seventeen years of comprehensive daily portfolio and trading data identified at the individual investor level, to analyze the relative trading performance of the entire universe of households, all domestic financial institutions and all foreign institutions in the Finnish market. We...

We combine a customized survey and randomized controlled trial (RCT) to study the effect of higher-order beliefs on U.S. retail investors' portfolio allocations. We find that investors' higher-order beliefs about stock market returns are correlated with but distinct from their first-order...

The paper studies mutual funds' portfolio management and investors' capital allocations in a unified framework under mandatory portfolio disclosure. By modeling fund managers and investors simultaneously, I show that more skill managers produce better performance by trading more actively, which...

We propose a simple portfolio management strategy that gauges the leverage based on the observed implied volatility index (VIX). The strategy involves taking less risk when the cumulative previous-month VIX is high and more when it is low. We show that the strategy yields more stable weights and...