The Korean insurance industry has rapidly grown over the past decade, and at the same time the asset size of Korean insurance companies increases very fast. So the effective and scientific asset management becomes very essential for these companies to stay profitable. Korean insurance companies...

This thesis consists of three essays on various topics in empirical financial studies. In Chapter 1, I study the profitability of momentum trading from evidence in mutual fund performance. I find that mutual funds that exhibit a strong momentum trading pattern earn significant risk-adjusted...

Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

This thesis consists of three chapters exploring predictability of stock returns. In the first chapter, I suggest a new approach to analysis of stock return predictability. Instead of relying on predictive regressions, I employ a state space framework. Acknowledging that expected returns and...

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

I analyze the intertemporal portfolio problem of an investor who has access to both taxable and tax-deferred (retirement) accounts. In a complete-market setting, through a tax-arbitrage argument, I show that tax-deferred accounts have only a wealth effect on overall portfolio decisions through...

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It...

This thesis consists of three chapters that investigate the complex relation between security prices and trades of market participants. In the first chapter, I study the evolution of stock prices after trades with different underlying motives using a novel data set of portfolio transitions....

This thesis consists of three essays on various topics in Financial Economics. Underwriter analysts issue recommendations that are on average more favorable than recommendations of other analysts. In Chapter 1, I investigate whether this bias matters for returns, and whether it matters for...

The first part of the thesis studies the impact of liquidity crashes on asset prices. In financial markets, liquidity could have large downward jumps. The thesis proposes a dynamic model where investors face the risk of potential liquidity crises. We find that investors choose optimal portfolios...