This paper shows the importance of correcting for sample selection when investing in illiquid assets with endogenous trading. Using a large sample of 20,538 paintings that were sold repeatedly at auction between 1972 and 2010, we find that paintings with higher price appreciation are more likely...

We show that the annual excess return of the S&P 500 is almost 10 percent higher during the last two years of the presidential cycle than during the first two years. This pattern cannot be explained by business-cycle variables capturing timevarying risk premia, differences in risk levels, or by...

Abstract: After nearly two decades of US leadership during the 1980s and 1990s, are Europe s venture capital (VC) markets in the 2000s finally catching up regarding the provision of financing and successful exits, or is the performance gap as wide as ever? Are we amid an overall VC performance...

In this paper, we consider optimal control problems involving a multidimensional objective function integral. We propose a direct collocation discretisation scheme suitable for the numerical solution of problems of this type. A convergence result is established to show that the scheme is...

We develop distress prediction models for non-financial small and medium enterprises (SMEs) using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that macro conditions and bankruptcy codes add predictive power to our...

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of anticipated/experienced regret and pride on individual investors decisions to hold or sell a winning or losing investment, in the form of the disposition effect. As expected the results suggest that in the loss domain, low anticipated regret...

We study a rent-seeking proprtional-prize contest between two heterogeneously risk-averse players and given prize amounts are normally distributed rather than known ex ante. We establish existence and unicity of a Nash equilibrium linked to this contest, and study the equilibrium e_orts implied....

Previous research suggests that investor sentiment has an influence on the market s risk-return trade-off. Noise traders demand for assets is considered to be risk independent and, as a result, risky assets do not offer a risk premium when demand is high. We show that market risk is only a...

Abstract: We investigate the effect of the fund provider s brand on mutual fund flows by using a unique data set that represents a direct assessment of the brand image of European fund providers. A superior brand image increases the sensitivity of flows to past performance, while an inferior...

This paper examines whether trading based on market sentiment can explain mispricing in S&P 500 options. We test the heterogeneous agent s option pricing model developed in Frijns et al. (2010), where our agents have different beliefs about the future level of market volatility and trade...