The purpose of this dissertation is to examine further the factors that influencefarmers’ decisions to participate in crop insurance programs. The factors consideredare RMA rules and farmers’ yield perceptions. In particular, the first paperexamined the role of Risk Management Agency’s...

If the Roll critique is important, changes in the variance of the stock market may be only weakly related to changes in aggregate risk and subsequent stock market excess returns. However, since individual stock returns share a common sensitivity to true market return shocks, higher aggregate...

If actively managed mutual funds suffer from diminishing returns to scale, funds should alter investment behavior as assets under management increase. Although asset growth has little effect on the behavior of the typical fund, we find that large funds and small-cap funds diversify their...

In this paper we provide evidence that equity returns lead credit protection returns at daily and weekly frequencies, while credit protection returns do not lead equity returns. Our results indicate that informed traders are primarily active in the equity market rather than the CDS market. These...

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AbstractTHREE ESSAYS IN BEHAVIORAL FINANCEByByoung-Hyoun HwangWhile not devoid of sentiment, self-interested rational decisionmakers in traditional economic models are assumed to be immune toits influence. The purpose of this dissertation is to explorewhether financial markets can be better...