This study reveals the information content of individual investors' risk-adjusted return expectations. Although individual investors overestimate the performance of their stock purchases on average, the cross-sectional variation in their risk-adjusted return expectations is predictive of future...

Do individual investors have better information about local stocks? Our results demonstrate that they do. Large trading imbalances by investors living close to a firm's headquarters predict the stock's earnings announcement return. Stocks with the most net buying by local investors average...

Our study suggests that despite the enforcement of insider trading laws, there are still some investors trading on their private information. Using account-level information, we show that some retail investors seem to be informed about particular stocks. When they sell short these stocks, they...

While it is well known that short selling predicts future negative stock price performance, it has not been established whether short selling predicts future negative operating performance. We find that firms in the top decile of increases in short interest (an increase of about four percentage...

We examine how the presentation of investment results affects risk taking using an experiment in which participants view results either asset by asset or aggregated into a portfolio result. Our experiment examines the investment choices of a nationwide sample of 249 participants in a simulation...

While much of the prior research on short selling around announcements of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) has focused on manipulation, it is unclear whether there is also informed short selling around these announcements. We test for informed short selling around SEO announcements by examining...

This study examines the financial literacy levels of students at Middle Tennessee State University and the effectiveness of tools on campus to increase students' knowledge of basic financial topics and their own student debt. We administer a survey across campus to students in multiple finance...

This study examines how cognitive changes associated with aging impact the financial decision making capability of older Americans. We find that a decrease in cognition is associated with a decrease in financial literacy. Decreases in episodic memory and visuospatial ability are associated with...

The brief’s key findings are: *With the shift from traditional pensions to 401(k) plans, the welfare of retirees depends increasingly on their ability to make sound financial decisions. *Using a dataset that follows a group of older individuals in the Chicago area, the analysis examines how...