This paper investigates mutual funds’ potential “greenwashing” behavior. Funds profiled as ESG- based receive higher inflows compared to other similar funds. Importantly, we show this is true also for ESG labeled funds having inferior objective ESG profiles, as based on Morningstar...

We develop a method for defining groups of peer firms on the basis of joint analyst coverage. Besides industry boundaries, analysts' coverage choices reflect other aspects of firm relatedness such as business model. We find that the analyst-based method produces substantially more homogenous...

We analyze household stock market participation and allocation in a survey covering 19 European countries. We jointly control for all relevant variables from prior studies, which typically focus on one at a time, and omit risk-aversion. Excellent full model predictive power decomposes into...

We use data from financial advisers' professional exam scores and other variables to build an index of financial sophistication. A one standard deviation reduction in sophistication increases long-term expected returns quoted to clients by 1.1 percentage points, and twice as much for emerging...

We develop two new methods for calibrating subjective expectations regarding the return generating process (RGP) of financial assets without resorting to noisy realized returns. Using finance professionals' expectations of average and extreme returns, volatilities, and probabilities of stocks...

The assumption that mood affects investors' behavior in the field is gaining acceptance due to experimental studies and papers linking stock returns with environmental variables, such as weather and length of day. To identify mood effects this paper utilizes account level stock trading data from...

We find that firms are more likely to split their stock if their peer firms have recently done so. The effect is comparable to an increase of 40-50% in the share price. Splitting probability is also increasing in the announcement returns of peer splits. These results are consistent with social...