Experimental and field data suggest that a social factor, discrimination, affects the risk perceptions and portfolio decisions of U.S. households. Experiments indicate that minorities perceive greater income risk. Minorities with relatively high risk perceptions are 10% less likely to invest....

This paper examines whether politically active individuals are more likely to participate in the stock market. Our key conjecture is that politically involved individuals follow political news more actively, which increases their chances of being exposed to financial news. Consequently, their...

We introduce new financial calendar anomalies on post holidays as well as best and worst day of the year. We find that the excess return in the stock market abnormal returns post major holidays: Thanksgiving (Black Friday), Christmas and New Year. Furthermore, we analyze the best and worst day...

Has Donald Trump made America great again? This paper considers President Trump's Tweet of November 22, 2017 about the stock market's $5.5 T gain since the election, in terms of who has benefited. We find that the top 5% and 10% wealthiest households gained approximately $3.87 T and $4.58 T...

As of 8/31/2020, the market cap (value) of Facebooks is $835.2 Billion, while the sum market caps of arguably top 5 Banks combined (J.P Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citi Group) only $816.7 Billion. In fact, Facebook cap is 10 times larger than Morgan Stanley, the lead...

We demonstrate that since the early 1990's, it is becoming increasingly common for firms to be run by CEOs who are aligned with the Democratic Party, which we refer to as the blue trend. We find evidence that at least one factor driving this trend appears to be the rise of the role of women, who...

This paper compares the stock market (S&P) performance during presidents Trump and Obama. The comparison is interesting since Obama employed a stimulus plan (demand side) while Trump employed a tax cut (supply side). We use the inauguration date as the benchmark start till analyses day 7/7/2019;...

This paper shows that the chance that an inverted yield curve correctly predicts recession is less than 3.9%, and is not even statistically significant. For instance, on March 22nd, 2019, an inversion occurred and the Dow lost 460 points, yet, after about a month the Dow reached an all-time...

Barber and Odean (2000) find that households who trade more have a lower net return than others and attribute this pattern to irrationality, particularly overconfidence. In contrast, we find that household financial choices generated from a dynamic optimization problem with rational agents and...

We show that social changes, like the success of role models, affects household financial decisions. Specifically, minorities underinvest in equity, which contributes to the widening racial wealth gap. But the election of President Obama in 2008, who is a role model from minorities, is a...