The 7th World Pensions Forum was held 22-23 March at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, a cradle of modern European culture. 120 pension executives and board members representing more than $10 trillion in combined wealth convened in Paris to discuss the regulatory and governance impact of...

We evaluate machine learning in investment research and find that forecasts of volatility derived from analyst and machine-learning output have similar explanatory power. Both predictions can benefit by incorporating information from the other and both are more accurate in common law than in...

This paper investigates the role of investor attention in forecasting realized volatility for fourteen international stock markets, by means of Google Trends data, over the sample period January 2004 through November 2021. We devise an augmented Empirical Similarity model that combines three...

Habits and sentiment are key psychological behaviors in asset pricing. This paper studies the interactive impacts of sentiment and habits on asset pricing using the Campbell and Cochrane 1999 habit model as a framework model. A positive sentiment shock emanating from firms is modeled in the...

We provide evidence that people do not consistently incorporate their beliefs into investment decisions. Our experimental findings indicate that selling is considerably less belief-driven than buying. This difference stems from selling decisions in the presence of paper losses for which we...

Technological progress in recent years has made new methods available for making forecasts in a variety of areas. We examine the success of ex-ante stock market forecasts of three major stock market indices, i.e., the German Stock Market Index (DAX), the Dow Jones Industrial Index (DJI), and the...

Unstable fluctuations in financial markets caused by the 2008 financial crisis and currently by the Covid-19 crisis have generated greater concern among investors regarding their capital protection. In view of this situation, the consideration of alternative investments has taken a relevant...

I empirically study how confirmatory bias works for strong and contradictory signals using data on sell-side analysts. I first model an agent who is prone to confirmatory bias and whose task is to value a stock based on a signal, and introduce the effects of the signal strength by relaxing Rabin...