We document strong persistence in the performance of trades of individual investors. Investors classified in the top 10 percent place other trades that on average earn excess returns of 15 basis points per day. A rolling-forward strategy of going long firms purchased by previously successful...

We propose a theory based on investor overconfidence and biased self- attribution to explain several of the securities returns patterns that seem anomalous from the perspective of efficient markets with rational investors. The theory is based on two premises derived from evidence in...

Facilitation of Competing Bids and the Price of a Takeover Target Abstract Initially uninformed bidders must incur costs to learn their (independent) valuations of a potential takeover target. The first bidder makes either a preemptive bid that will deter the second bidder from investigating, or...

We propose that owing to limited investor attention and skepticism of complexity, firms with greater innovative originality (IO) will be undervalued, especially for firms with higher valuation uncertainty, lower attention, and greater sensitivity of future profitability to IO. We find that IO...

Behavioral finance studies the application of psychology to finance, with a focus on individual-level cognitive biases. I describe here the sources of judgment and decision biases, how they affect trading and market prices, the role of arbitrage and flows of wealth between more rational and less...

Parity, and whether the test is cross-sectional versus time series.

In Chinese culture, certain digits are lucky and others unlucky. We test how such numerological superstition affects financial decision in the China IPO market. We find that the frequency of lucky numerical stock listing codes exceeds what would be expected by chance. Also consistent with...

An unresolved issue in empirical research on corporate control is the extent to which takeovers improve target and bidder firm value. We provide estimates of value improvements that avoid the bidder-revelation bias present in previous studies. Our approach, the intervention method, is based on a...

The model examines the underlying spot market determinants of hedging and risk premia. The analysis takes into account spot market clearing, quantity and price variability, stock market portfolio opportunities, diverse output distributions of producers, demand and supply shocks, and supply...