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We show that a common (identical across investors) irrationality in information processing can be enough to create nontrivial trade, using one of standard partial-equilibrium environments. We can attribute this trade to their common irrationality because we strip the investors and their circumstances of all heterogeneities but purely age (in a sense experience), make investment horizon age-independent, and keep all information complete. The common irrationality in our model takes the form of a somewhat non-Bayesian information processing. The resulting trade between such essentially identical individuals with the very same irrationality in their information processing can also feature different kinds of mispricing.

Im Zuge der deutschen Wiedervereinigung wurden die formalen Institutionen in West- und Ostdeutschland schnell angeglichen. Dies galt insbesondere auch für die Kapitelmärkte. Nach Einrichtung eines Wertpapierdepots konnten nun auch Ostdeutsche risikobehaftete Wertpapiere unterschiedlichster Art erwerben und in ihrem Portfolio halten. Im vorliegenden Beitrag untersuchen wir anhand von anonymisierten Kundendaten von Sparkassen aus dem Jahr 2006, inwiefern sich auch die informellen Institutionen in West- und Ostdeutschland angeglichen haben. Wir kommen zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich west- und ostdeutsche Sparkassenkunden in ihrer Neigung, riskante Anlagen zu halten, mehr als 15 Jahre nach der Wiedervereinigung noch deutlich unterschieden. Informelle Institutionen ändern sich demnach nur sehr träge.

Die Anlage in Aktien spielt in der bankbasierten Ökonomie Deutschlands eine weitaus geringere Rolle als in den marktbasierten USA. Das sich hierin widerspiegelnde anders geartete Risikoverhalten ist nur vor dem Hintergrund unterschiedlicher kultureller Kontexte zu verstehen. Die Deutschen sind in ihrem Anlageverhalten stark sicherheitsorientiert, wobei sie ein - wie sich gezeigt hat, nicht immer begründetes - großes Vertrauen in ihre Bankberater haben. Offenbar treten in Deutschland Renditeerwartungen gegenüber einem gesellschaftlich eingeübten und allgemein akzeptierten Verhaltensmuster zurück. Despite a global homogenisation of financial markets, some characteristic national structures of private investors' behaviour have been preserved. The underlying persistence of observable differences is due to the embeddedness of these markets in historical, institutional and cultural frameworks. Thus, the perception of fi nancial risk is a function of culturally inherited social norms and conventions attached to different fi nancial risk-taking domains. Private investors' behaviour is guided by heterogeneous versions of rationality, thus explaining why households in bank-based systems like Germany provide banks with 'patient capital' even at the price of lower return expectations.

This article explores the influence of competitive conditions on the evolutionary fitness of different risk preferences. As a practical example, the professional competition between fund managers is considered. To explore how different settings of competition parameters, the exclusion rate and the exclusion interval, affect individual investment behavior, an evolutionary model is developed. Using a simple genetic algorithm, two attributes of virtual fund managers evolve: the share of capital invested in a risky asset and the amount of excessive risk accepted, where a positive value of the latter parameter points to an inefficient investment portfolio. The simulation experiments illustrate that the influence of competitive conditions on investment behavior and attitudes towards risk is significant. What is alarming is that intense competitive pressure generates risk-seeking behavior and undermines the predominance of the most skilled. In these conditions, evolution does not necessarily select managers with efficient portfolios. These results underline the institutional need for the creation of a competitive framework in which risk-taking does not provide an evolutionary advantage per se, and indicate measures on how to achieve this.

The paper deals with the motives of people to invest in overvalued markets. We resort to the concepts of behavioural fi nance to describe the most important factors. Based on these fi ndings we deduct measures to avoid misjudgement of markets participants. As Bikhchandani and Sharma (2000) show, the concept of herd behaviour plays a decisive role in explaining exuberance in markets. There are incentives for investors, money managers and analysts to imitate other's actions. Furthermore, conservatism as well as heuristics like representativeness may also lead to a confi rmation of prevailing trends. Another driver of misjudgement is the usage of heuristics like representativeness. The authors consider that the provision of information may substantially contribute to the reduction of misjudgement and exuberance in markets. Both availability and quality of information are important. Another approach aims at the regulation of bank lending, which should be limited particularly during a booming economy. Der Untersuchungsgegenstand der Arbeit ist die Darstellung der wichtigsten Anlegermotive bei Marktübertreibungen. Es wird dabei auf Konzepte der verhaltensorientierten Kapitalmarktforschung zurückgegriffen. Basierend auf den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen werden Lösungsansätze zur Vermeidung von Marktübertreibungen abgeleitet. Untersuchungen, beispielsweise durch Bikhchandani und Sharma (2000), haben gezeigt, dass Herdenverhalten eine wichtige Rolle bei der Erklärung von Preisübertreibungen spielt. Dabei kann es rational sein, sich konform zur Masse der Marktteilnehmer zu verhalten. Neben dem Konzept des Herdenverhaltens kann Konservatismus unter Marktteilnehmern zur Bestätigung vorherrschender Trends beitragen. Heuristiken werden angewandt, um komplexe Sachverhalte zu vereinfachen. Insbesondere die Repräsentativitätsheuristik kann zu einer Verstärkung bestehender Preisübertreibungen führen. Die Autoren sind der Ansicht, dass vor allem eine Verbesserung der Informationsbasis zur Reduzierung von Fehleinschätzungen durch Marktteilnehmer beitragen kann. Sowohl die Verfügbarkeit als auch die Qualität der Informationen spielen dabei eine Rolle. Ein weiterer Lösungsansatz betrifft die Risikoeinstellung und Kreditvergabe der Banken. In Boomphasen sollte das Risiko eines Crashs berücksichtigt werden.

This paper gives a complete characterization of the equilibria in Shleifer and Vishny's (1997) model of "Limits of Arbitrage". We show that expected wealth (the arbitrageurs' objective function) is a possibly non-concave function of investment and that the relation between investment and prices is not necessarily continuous or single-valued or well-defined. As a result, "anything is possible": non-existence or multiplicity of equilibria may arise, and sunspots may govern the equilibrium selection in the latter case. Es wird eine vollstandige Charakterisierung moglicher Gleichgewichte im Shleifer-Vishny-Modell zu Grenzen der Arbitrage vorgenommen. Zunachst wird gezeigt, dass die Zielfunktion der Arbitrageure - ihr erwartetes Vermogen - eine nicht-konkave Funktion ihrer Investitionen ist und dass die Abbildung, die die aggregierten Investitionen und die Vermogenspreise in Beziehung zueinander setzt, moglicherweise unstetig, mehrwertig oder gar nicht wohldefiniert ist. Als Konsequenz hieraus "ist alles moglich": Nicht-Existenz eines Gleichgewichts ebenso wie Multiplizitat. Im zweiten Fall konnen Sonnenflecken die Gleichgewichtsauswahl bestimmen.

Mit der Einführung der privaten Riester-Rente und der privaten Versicherung des Zahnersatzes ist Deutschland - wie Bundespräsident Horst Köhler es formulierte - auf dem Weg, "eine neue Balance von Eigenverantwortung und kollektiver Absicherung" zu finden. Es ist zu vermuten, dass mittelfristig die Verlagerung der Risikoabsicherung in den privaten Bereich einen noch wesentlich stärkeren Umfang annehmen wird. Der freiwilligen Eigenvorsorge wird damit auch qualitativ eine neue Bedeutung zuwachsen: Künftig wird sie nicht mehr nur ergänzenden Charakter haben, sondern die staatlich erzwungene und organisierte Vorsorge in Teilen ersetzen. Wenn dies funktionieren soll, sind Markttransparenz und informierte Verbraucher unerlässlich. Auf die steigerungsfähige Transparenz auf Versicherungsmärkten weisen Verbraucherschutzverbände schon seit langem hin. In diesem Bericht wird untersucht, inwiefern Verbraucher als informiert gelten können. Es zeigt sich, dass es in Deutschland um die "Financial Literacy" bislang nicht zum Besten gestellt ist. So schätzt nicht einmal die Hälfte der 30- bis 50-Jährigen die Sicherheit verschiedener Anlageformen richtig ein, und ein Drittel weiß nicht, dass die Kündigungskosten von Kapitallebensversicherungen in den ersten Jahren nach Vertragsabschluss die höchsten von allen Anlageprodukten sind.

Mission Investing (MI) is an umbrella term for the practice of non-profit organizations (NPO) to include their mission into their investment policy. Despite the growing popularity of this concept it still greatly lacks a scientific foundation. This article identifies key characteristics of MI by conducting a conceptual discussion. These characteristics include the incorporation of non-monetary goals into the investments process which are closely related to the organization's mission and values as well as the aim of achieving a more effective mission accomplishment through the unification of investment- and grantmaking policy. Further, in the framework of a meta-analysis, this article compares recently published data from across Europe with regard to the current state-of-art of MI. Among the three basic instruments of MI (screening, shareholder advocacy, and proactive mission investing), screening is used the most. Unter dem Oberbegriff "Mission Investing" (MI) versteht sich die Praxis bei Nonprofit Organisationen (NPO), das organisationseigene Sachziel in die Anlagestrategie mit einzuschliessen. Trotz stets steigender Popularität fehlt dem Konzept bisher weitgehend eine wissenschaftliche Fundierung. Mittels einer begrifflichen Diskussion identifiziert dieser Beitrag Schlüsselmerkmale des Anlagekonzepts. Diese Merkmale umfassen unter anderem den Einschluss von non-monetären Anlagezielen, welche eng mit dem Organisationszweck verwandt sind, sowie die Zielsetzung der effektiveren Umsetzung des Organisationszwecks durch die Verknüpfung von Anlage- und Förderpolitik. Weiter vergleicht dieser Beitrag im Rahmen einer Metaanalyse neu erschienene Daten zum aktuellen Umsetzungsstand von MI in Europa. Ausgehend von den drei Instrumenten des MI (Screening, Shareholder Advocacy und Proactive Mission Investing) wird dieses derzeit am häufigsten mittels Screening umgesetzt.

On the basis of empirical data for the Swiss market this paper confirms the hypothesis that the lower direct costs of online trading (brokerage) are cancelled out by higher indirect costs (in the form of information processing costs). In addition, the report provides evidence that during the sampling period online investors earned above-average returns and had above-average financial expertise at their disposal. Besides the cost aspect, the time used for information gathering and the benefits derived from this are also considered, alongside such elements as play, control and social interaction. The study also documents that online investors trade more frequently and are more speculative. These results can be better explained by the illusion of knowledge than by a rational behaviour approach. The findings relating to the returns and know-how of private investors show major differences between the Swiss market and similar studies for US investors.

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went bankrupt, many lenders were exposed. In the end, none of them actually lost money. Nonetheless, only those at risk of losing money changed their behavior markedly – they lent with much higher haircuts. The rest continued largely as before. The differential change is remarkable since the distress was public knowledge. Overall leverage in the Amsterdam stock market declined as a result.

This study analyzes the trading activity of institutional investors on German Stock Exchanges to evaluate herding behavior and its determinants. The paper uses a unique and superior high-frequent investor-level database that directly identifies every transaction of banks and financial service institutions in German stocks. The analysis therefore overcomes the data problems that previous studies face and provides new evidence on the short-term herding behavior of financial institutions. By covering the period from July 2006 until March 2009, the datasample includes market upturns as well as the recent market turmoil resulted in a rapid downturn. First, the analysis reveals short-term herding behavior of most active financial institutions. Second, the replication of the analysis with low-frequent and anonymous transaction data, on which the bulk of literature is based, indicates an overestimation of herding by previous studies. Third, as opposed to findings in prior studies, our results do not confirm that small capitalization and less liquid stocks are more vulnerable to herding behavior. We find that herding is more pronounced in DAX 30 shares with a herding level of 5.17% for the most active institutions. These results suggest that herding behavior by financial institutions is not attributed to less information availability or information asymmetry. It rather occurs unintentionally and results from sharing the same preference and investment style. Fourth, a panel analysis confirms this conclusion and gives further insights on the determinants of herding. In particular, herding depends on past volatility and past returns of the specific stock. Herding on the buy side is negatively related, whereas herding on the sell side is positively related to past returns. These results imply contrary to previous studies, that financial institutions are not engaged in positive feedback strategies. Moreover, we found that financial institutions herd more on the sell side according to a rise in volatility of the stocks. This could be a result of the common use of risk models, for instance VaR models, which reduce the diversity of decision rules forcing banks to act like a herd.

This paper uses Latent Semantic Analysis to extract information from Bank of Canada communication statements and investigates what type of information affects returns and volatility in short-term as well as long-term interest rate markets over the 2002-2008 period. Discussions about geopolitical risk and other external shocks, major domestic shocks (SARS and BSE), the balance of risks to the economic projection, and various forward looking statements are found to significantly affect market returns and volatility, especially for short-term markets. This effect is over and above that from the information contained in any policy interest rate surprise., Les auteurs utilisent l'analyse sémantique latente pour extraire l'information que renferment les communications de la Banque du Canada et ensuite examiner quel type d'information a influencé les rendements et la volatilité sur les marchés de taux d'intérêt à court et à long terme durant la période 2002-2008. Ils constatent que les déclarations prospectives de la Banque et ses analyses du risque géopolitique et d'autres chocs extérieurs, d'importants chocs intérieurs (p. ex., l'épidémie de SRAS et la découverte d'un cas de maladie de la vache folle) et de la résultante des risques entourant sa projection économique ont une incidence significative sur les rendements et la volatilité, surtout dans le cas des marchés à court terme. Cet effet est distinct de celui lié à la diffusion de toute information inattendue concernant le taux directeur.

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of equilibria. We find that a main driver of the characterization of equilibria is whether the actions of investors are strategic substitutes or complements. This latter property in turn is driven by the strength of a private learning channel from prices, arising from the multidimensional sources of asymmetric information, in relation to the usual public learning channel. When the private learning channel is strong (weak) in relation to the public we have strong (weak) strategic complementarity in actions and potentially multiple (unique) equilibria. The results enable a precise characterization of whether information acquisition decisions are strategic substitutes or complements. We find that the strategic substitutability in information acquisition result obtained in Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) is robust. JEL Classification: D82, D83, G14 Keywords: Rational expectations equilibrium, asymmetric information, risk exposure, hedging, supply information, information acquisition.

The author suggests that the 2008 financial crisis was the culmination of an accelerating and inherently unstable process of financial market evolution. He argues that markets are not well organized to manage the power that financial assets have to generate emotion and their wider effect on human imagination and judgement, anchored in neurobiology. Judgements and decisions about risk, reward and the evaluation of success can become systematically compromised because the excitement of potential gain is disconnected from anxiety about potential consequences, producing groupthink and bubbles. When anxiety breaks through, a catastrophic loss of confidence is inevitable. In the aftermath the emotional pain that would be involved in accepting responsibility stands in the way of lessons being learned. The author’s theoretical framework is influenced by modern psychoanalysis and draws on an interview study of international fund managers in 2007. He suggests that underlying psychological conflicts have influenced the way market institutions have evolved to compete by selling the promise of exceptional performance. To cope with the expectations upon them, agents are impelled to base their actions on stories which overvalue opportunities and underestimate risks; this creates agency issues and facilitates the process of disconnecting anxiety from excitement that creates bubble potential. Policy implications go well beyond improving regulation and transparency. Special issue Managing Financial Instability in Capitalist Economies

We develop a model of one representative agent and one asset. The agent evaluates the earnings according to Prospect Theory and he does not know exactly the stochastic process generating earnings. While the earnings are generated by a random walk process, the agent considers a Markovian process, according to which firm’s earnings move between two regimes, represented by a mean-reverting process and a trend process, as in Barberis, Shleifer and Vishny (1998). We study how an agent who is loss averse evaluates the price of a stock when she takes into account the wrong stochastic process. This twofold departure from rationality determines permanent effects on stock prices, even in long run. First, the model shows that agent who evaluates the asset according to Prospect Theory consistently underestimates the asset, due to loss aversion bias. This is shown under two different assumption regarding the functional form of utility. A kinked linear utility function (as in Bernatzi and Thaler, 1985) and the original and more general specification of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) are used. The model allows to explain observed phenomenon in the cross-section earnings return distribution. We solve this model and according to Barberis et all (1998), we evaluate the framework by using artificial data sets of earnings and prices simulated from the model. For plausible range of parameter values, it generates the empirical predictions of overreaction and underreaction observed in the data are explained.

Es werden mehrere Anlagestrategien mit Hilfe von Stichproben und statistischen Signifikanztest untersucht,die in der Zeitschrift Capital als besonders erfolgversprechend empfohlen werden. Daraus lässt sich entnehmen, ob diese für eine Anlagestrategie zur Altersvorsorge eine gewisse Eignung vorweisen.

In 1997, France Télécom, the French telecommunications firm, went through a partial privatization. The government offered current and prior France Télécom employees the opportunity to buy portfolios of shares with various combinations of discounts, required holding periods, and levels of downside protection. We adapt a neoclassical model of investment decision-making that takes into account firm-specific human capital and holding period restrictions to predict how employees might respond to the share offers. Using a new database that tracks over 200,000 eligible participants, we analyse the employees' characteristics and their decisions regarding (a) whether to participate; (b) how much to invest; and (c) what form of stock alternatives they selected. The results are broadly consistent with the neoclassical model. However, the amount of funds invested in the stock plans seems driven by a different set of forces than the decision to participate. While former employees and retirees are less likely to participate in the offering, they tend to invest more than others conditional on participating. We suspect that this phenomenon reflects a 'threshold effect', which we attempt to measure. Employees forewent benefits equal to one to two months' salary by failing to participate. Finally, we find that the characteristics of the average chosen portfolios are broadly consistent with theoretical predictions from our neoclassical model, but almost all potential participants underweighted the most valuable asset, a decision hard to reconcile with rational portfolio choice.

This paper considers a general class of stochastic dynamic choice models with discrete and continuous decision variables. This class contains a variety of models that are useful for modeling intertemporal household decisions under risk. Our examples are drawn from the field of development economics. We formalize this class as a dynamic programming problem, then propose a solution method that relies on value function iteration. Finally, in an example we show how our algorithm can be applied to solve and estimate a dynamic model with discrete and continuous controls.

Recent research has shown that institutional herding is a relevant phenomenon in stock markets. Do institutional investors also follow each other in bond markets? This paper focuses on the German bond market and uses data from 57 German mutual funds that invest mainly in DM-denominated bonds, which represents 71% of the total market volume. Due to the variety and large number of bonds that exist, we do not expect mutual funds to herd with regard to separate bonds. We believe instead that bonds with the same characteristics such as interest rate, maturity, collateral, or issuer are considered to be equivalent by institutional investors. Consequently, we construct "bond groups" consisting of similar bonds and analyze herding at a "bond group" level. Our results indicate that there is strong evidence of herding, albeit it is weaker than in stock markets. Further analysis suggests that mutual funds do not place an equal weight on different bond characteristics. Nominal interest rates appear to be most important in the bond selection process.

We develop an agent-based financial market model in which agents follow technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their speculative investment positions. A central feature of our model is that we consider direct interactions between speculators due to which they may decide to change their trading behavior. For instance, if a technical trader meets a fundamental trader and they realize that fundamental trading has been more profitable than technical trading in the recent past, the probability that the technical trader switches to fundamental trading rules is relatively high. Our simple setup is able to replicate some salient features of asset price dynamics.