We directly compare retail investor execution costs with exchange execution costs. We find off-exchange retail trades execute at lower effective spreads than comparable exchange trades, primarily due to the uninformed nature of retail trades. These results hold when payment for order flow (PFOF)...

Using the number of Robinhood users holding a firm’s shares, I examine how novice retail investors respond to earnings announcements and the implications of their responses for the price-earnings relation. I do not find evidence of informed trading among these investors. Changes in their...

In this paper, we develop a model in which overconfident market participants and rational speculators trade against trend-chasers. We show that the growth and the burst of a financial bubble stem from positive feedback trading. However, the presence of overconfident traders and the risk aversion...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

Random changes in firms' stock index membership have important implications on sell-side analysts' career outcomes. Covered firms moving from the bottom of Russell 1000 to the top of Russell 2000 significantly increase an analyst's likelihood of moving to a high-status broker or receiving a...

Open banking (OB) empowers bank customers to share transaction data with fintechs and other banks. 49 countries have adopted OB policies. Consumer trust in fintechs predicts OB policy adoption and adoption spurs investment in fintechs. UK microdata shows that OB enables: i) consumers to access...

What is the benefit of experience? Using data from a leading trading platform we find no evidence that retail FX traders learn to trade better, but they do appear to make valid inferences about their innate abilities as traders. In particular, following an unsuccessful trading day they are more...

Climate change is a “crisis multiplier” that has profound effects on various aspects of household decisions. We study the impact of climate change concern on household’s climate-risk-based investment decisions using administrative account-level data of all retail investors from the...