How do investors perceive dependence between stock returns? And how does their perception of dependence affect investments and stock prices? We show experimentally that investors understand differences in dependence, but not in terms of correlation. Participants invest as if applying a simple...

We perform a large-scale empirical analysis of pairs trading, a popular relative-value arbitrage approach. We start with a cross-country study of 34 international stock markets and uncover that abnormal returns are a persistent phenomenon. We then construct a comprehensive U.S. data set to...

Exploiting several regional holidays in Germany as a source of exogenous cross-sectional variation in investor attention, we provide evidence that the well-known local bias at the individual level materially affects stock turnover at the firm level. The German setting offers favorable...

Good news can involve difficult decisions. For example winning a lottery jackpot can go along with the decision, whether to have the jackpot paid out immediately as a lump sum or as periodic annual payments. Also when entering retirement most people face the decision whether they want their...

Return-chasing investors almost exclusively consider top-performing funds for their investment decisions. When drawing conclusions about the managerial skill of these top performers, they tend to neglect fund volatility and the cross-sectional information contained in the number of funds and the...

Between September08 and June09, a period with significant market events, we surveyed UK online-brokerage customers at three-months intervals for their willingness to take risk, three-months expectations of returns and risks for the market and their own portfolio, and self-reported risk attitude....

To understand how real investors use their beliefs and preferences in investing decisions, we examine a panel survey of self-directed online investors at a UK bank. The survey asks for return expectations, risk expectations, and risk tolerance of these investors in three-month intervals between...

In this paper we investigate four hypotheses which are inconsistent with expected utility theory, but may well be explained by prospect theory. It deals with framing, the non-linearity of subjective probabilities, the disposition effect, and the correspondence of different experimental risk...

We perform a large-scale empirical analysis of pairs trading, a popular relative-value arbitrage approach. We start with a cross-country study of 34 international stock markets and uncover that abnormal returns are a persistent phenomenon. We then construct a comprehensive U.S. data set to...

Motivated by the time-series insights of Daniel and Moskowitz (2016), we investigate the link between expected skewness and momentum in the cross-section. The alpha of skewness-enhanced (-weakened) momentum is about twice (half) as large as the traditional alpha. These findings are driven by the...