Behavioral Aspects of Financial Decision Making

Behavioral Aspects of Financial Decision Making
Author: Emanuela Trifan
Publisher: Sudwestdeutscher Verlag Fur Hochschulschriften AG
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2009
Genre: Finance
ISBN: 9783838107899

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The present work seeks for a deeper motivation of those financial market behaviors that remained unexplained by traditional economic theories. It is the result of some years of research in the areas of Behavioral Finance and Market Microstructure. The work undertakes the challenging task of quantifying "less-rational" aspects of financial decision-making, such as simplified trading rules, emotional reactions, and subjective perceptions and beliefs. To this purpose, not only are traditional models extended in order to account for behavioral elements, but also new models and measures are developed and tested by means of numerical simulations. Surprisingly, it appears that rational trading is not the only way to make money, and the presence of less-than-perfectly rational traders can be compatible with stable and efficient markets. Not only trading decisions but also investment decisions are highly sensitive to subjective attitudes. The work helps to identify several trading and investment strategies that ensure the success and survival of their users and maximize their risky holdings, respectively.

Three Essays in Behavioral Finance

Three Essays in Behavioral Finance
Author: Michael Young
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

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Over the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in research related to behavioral finance. As Barberis and Thaler (2002) point out, there are two main aspect of behavioral finance: limits to arbitrage and the effects of psychology. My dissertation will focus on the second aspect, the effects of psychology on individual investor behavior. The first essay examines an important question in this behavioral finance literature: changes in aggregate risk aversion. I use changes in the level of terrorism in the United States as a shock to the aggregate mood of American investors, and examine changes in flows to mutual funds as a proxy for investor risk preferences. After examining investors vulnerable to changes in mood after attacks, and ruling out any possible effect due to changes in expect risk, and changes to expected returns, the first essay concludes that mood driven risk aversion is the likely cause of the change in behavior. In the second essay, we use the insights gained from Essay 1 regarding the change in behavior of U.S. investors following an increase in terrorist attacks. Using household level of equity market participation and individual trading data the second essay examines the array of decisions investors make. The second essay finds that households participate less in equity markets, trade less, but purchase more local stocks in response to terrorist attacks. Additionally, this change in behavior is especially apparent in households where the designated head is a male. Finally, in the third essay we turn away from terrorism, and examine the effects that local NFL team performance on equity market participation. Examining the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. the third essay shows that poor performance by local NFL teams correlates with fewer households in that state owning equity. While previous studies argue that sentiment is the driver of sports related behavior, the third essay find that gambling losses may also play a role in the drop in equity market participation following seasons with a low number of wins. Taken together, the dissertation demonstrates the importance of examining external shocks and the effect they have on the behavior of investors. From terrorism to something as seemingly benign as the NFL, the dissertation adds to the behavior finance literature by identifying new shocks that effect the investing behavior of individuals.

Three Essays on Behavioral Finance

Three Essays on Behavioral Finance
Author: Gabriele M. Lepori
Publisher:
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2008
Genre: Efficient market theory
ISBN:

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Essays in Behavioral Finance

Essays in Behavioral Finance
Author: Xing Huang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation contains three essays in behavioral finance. It explores investors' (non-standard) behaviors and their impacts on market efficiency and market valuations. I strive to empirically characterize how market participants behave, and to identify how these behaviors can improve our understanding of the financial market. The first chapter studies the impact of prior investment experience in an industry on the subsequent purchase of new stocks in the same industry. Using trading records data for households at a large discount broker from 1991 to 1996, I establish that the experience of positive excess returns in a given industry increases the probability of purchasing similar stocks in that industry relative to other industries. This result is robust to industry momentum, wealth effects, and investor heterogeneity. The effect decays when the experience is further in the past. Furthermore, I find that investor sophistication mitigates this experience effect. These results are consistent with mechanisms where investors put more weight on their own experience than on other available historical information when updating the beliefs about an industry's future return. The results are also consistent with investors learning about their stock-picking ability in an industry from their experienced outcomes. In the second chapter, I ask the question: do investors slow to incorporate return-relevant information if it reflects firms' operations abroad? Using the corresponding industry return in the foreign countries, I show that foreign operations information is slowly incorporated into stock prices. A trading strategy exploiting the foreign operations information of multinational firms generates a monthly abnormal return of approximately $0.80$ percentage points, controlling for risk-based factors. The return predictability is not driven by U.S. industry momentum, global industry momentum or foreign country-specific industry momentum. The third chapter further explores the underlying mechanism to explain the market under-reaction to foreign information identified in the second chapter. The return predictability becomes more pronounced for smaller firms and firms with less analyst coverage, lower institutional holdings, lower fraction of foreign operations and more complicated international operations structure. I also find that stock prices respond more to foreign operations information during the month of a quarterly earnings announcement or when there is more foreign news relative to domestic news appearing in the media. In addition, information about firms' operations in Asia is delayed more than information about operations in Europe and English-speaking countries. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that news about multinational firms' foreign operations diffuses gradually, indicating investors' limited attention and processing capacity for foreign information.