Do older investors make better investment decisions

Abstract -This paper examines the investment decisions of older individual investors. We find that older and experienced investors are more likely to follow "rules of thumb" that reflect greater investment knowledge. However, older investors are less effective in applying their investment knowledge and exhibit worse investment skill, especially if they are less educated, earn lower income, and belong to minority racial/ethnic groups. Overall, the adverse effects of aging dominate the positive effects of experience. These results indicate that older investors' portfolio decisions reflect greater knowledge about investing but investment skill deteriorates with age due to the adverse effects of cognitive aging. (JEL D14, G11, J14

Big fish in a small pond : locally dominant firms and the business cycle

Following Gabaix (2011), we identify locally dominant firms that have a strong impact on their local macroeconomic environment, but are not among the largest 100 U.S. firms. Idiosyncratic shocks to these locally dominant firms propagate nationally and explain a significant portion of aggregate U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations. Specifically, we find that locally dominant firms exist in 13 U.S. states and productivity shocks to these firms explain almost 50% of the U.S. GDP growth

Local Business Cycles and Local Liquidity

This study examines whether state-level economic conditions affect the liquidity of local firms. We find that liquidity levels of local stocks are higher (lower) when the local economy has performed well (poorly). This relation is stronger when local financing constraints are more binding, the local information environment is more opaque, and local institutional ownership levels and trading intensity are higher. Overall the evidence supports the notion that the geographical segmentation of U.S. capital markets generates predictable patterns in local liquidity

Initial Public Offerings and the Firm Location

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the proportion of the equity wealth is abnormally increasing with the volume of the IPOs inside the investor region. Upon nearly the universe of the 167,515 going public and private domestic manufacturing firms, we provide consistent evidence that the isolated private firms have higher probability to go public, larger IPO underpricing cross-sectional average and volatility, and less pronounced long-run under-performance. Similar but opposite evidence holds for the local concentration of the investor wealth. These effects are economically relevant and robust to local delistings, IPO market timing, agglomeration economies, firm location endogeneity, self-selection bias, and information asymmetries, among others. Findings suggest IPO waves have a strong geographic component, highlight that underwriters significantly under-estimate the local demand component thus leaving unexpected money on the table, and support state-contingent but constant investor propensity for risk

Estimating Panel Models With Internal and External Habit Formation

A new bias-corrected estimator is developed for dynamic panel model with both fixed and spatial effects. The estimator is asymptotically unbiased, normally distributed, and it has good finite sample properties (low finite sample bias and root mean squared error). Applying the estimator to annual consumption data for the continental U.S. states shows that state consumption growth is not significantly affected by its own (lagged) consumption growth. However, it is affected by lagged consumption growth of nearby states. These results support external habit formation model, which have been used to explain the behavior of U.S. stock returns

Habit Formation, Incomplete Markets, and the Significance of Regional Risk for Expected Returns

This paper introduces a consumption-based capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) that combines undiversifiable income shocks and external habit formation. Using US state-level data, the paper provides realistic estimates for preference parameters when the external habit of the state investors is based on the consumption of the four Census regions. The model also implies four asset pricing factors: the cross-sectional means of consumption growth and habit growth (capturing national systematic risk) and the cross-sectional variances of consumption growth and habit growth (capturing regional systematic risk). This four-factor model has greater power in explaining expected returns than the CCAPM described in Breeden (1979). , Oxford University Press.