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

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.

Does speculation affect spot price levels? the case of metals with and without futures markets

This paper finds no evidence that speculative activity in futures markets for industrial metals caused higher spot prices in recent years. The empirical analysis focuses on industrial metals with and without futures contracts and is organized around two key themes. First, I show that the comovement between metals with and without futures contracts has not weakened in recent years as speculative activity has risen. Specifically, the annual and quarterly price growth rates of the two metal categories have been positively correlated with their growth rates experiencing a structural shift by the end of 2002. This comovement is driven by economic fundamentals because world GDP growth is strongly correlated with metal price growth, especially after 2002. The structural change in 2002 is also consistent with supply and demand information found in industry newsletters. In the second set of results, I focus more directly on financial speculation and spot price inflation. I use the S&P Goldman-Sachs Commodity Index returns to proxy for the volume of speculative activity and I show that these returns are unrelated to metal prices. The final test follows storage models, which suggest that speculation can affect spot markets only if it leads to physical hoarding. Focusing on metals with established futures markets, I find no evidence of physical hoarding because inventory growth is found to be negatively correlated with price growth rates.Commodity futures

Do portfolio distortions reflect superior information or psychological biases?

AbstractUsing a demographics-based proxy for smartness, we show that the portfolio distortions of “smart” investors reflect an informational advantage, while the distortions of “dumb” investors reflect psychological biases. Specifically, smart investors outperform dumb investors by about 3% annually on a risk-adjusted basis. Furthermore, among investors with high portfolio distortions, smart investors outperform passive benchmarks by 2%, and the smart-dumb performance differential is 5%. At the stock level, a portfolio of stocks with smart investor clientele outperforms the dumb clientele portfolio by 3.50% annually. These findings suggest that behavioral and information-based explanations for portfolio distortions apply to distinct subsets of investors.</jats:p