The preferred risk habitat hypothesis, introduced here, is that individual investors select stocks whose volatilities are commensurate with their risk aversion. The data, 1995-2000 holdings of over 20,000 clients at a large German broker, are consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis:...

The preferred risk habitat hypothesis, introduced here, is that individual investors select stocks whose volatilities are commensurate with their risk aversion. The data, 1995-2000 holdings of over 20,000 clients at a large German broker, are consistent with the predictions of the hypothesis:...

Retail clients at a major German discount broker trade in tandem - they tend to be on the same side of the market in a given stock during a given day, week, month, and quarter. Neither aggregate liquidity effects nor short sale constraints fully explain this behavior. The systematic execution of...

Although established money managers operate in an environment which seems competitive, they also seem to be very profitable. The present value of the expected future profits from managing a collection of funds is equal to the value of the assets under management multiplied by the profit margin,...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a bubble, or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

A liquidity trader wishes to trade a fixed number of shares within a certain time horizon and to minimize the mean and variance of the costs of trading. Explicit formulas for the optimal trading strategies show that risk-averse liquidity traders reduce their order sizes over time and execute a...

Records of 793, 794 employees eligible to participate in 647 defined contribution pension plans are studied. About 71% of them choose to participate in the plans, and of the participants, 12% choose to contribute the maximum allowed, $10,500. The main findings are (other things equal) (i)...

We study optimal liquidity trading in a framework where trade size has a price impact. A liquidity trader wishes to trade a fixed number of shares within a certain time horizon and to minimize the mean and variance of the costs of trading. Explicit formulas for the optimal trading strategies...

We examine the geographic distribution of the shareholders of the U.S. Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) and document that a customer of an RBOC is more likely to invest in his local company than in an RBOC in another service area. Holdings of the local RBOC tend to be larger than...

Shortfall aversion reflects the higher utility loss of a spending cut from a reference point than the utility gain from a similar spending increase, in the spirit of Prospect Theory's loss aversion. This paper posits a model of utility of spending scaled by a function of past peak spending,...