abstract: After the 2008 financial crisis, along with information technology and its application innovation into the burst period, Shared faster economic growth, and then entered into a rapid expansion in 2014, quickly penetrate into many areas and market segments. As the securities industry practitioners and Internet financial practitioners, I am very concerned about sharing economic model in the development of securities investment niche. As the Internet and mobile penetration rate rise in recent years, the Internet financial in the rapid development of our country, investors get used for investment decision-making information via the Internet. Internet social investment sharing platform based on knowledge sharing and rapid development, has formed "opinion leaders", "combined with", "automated financial innovation model". The emergence of these new patterns, provide investors with investment of knowledge sharing, the investors behavior changes, many small and medium-sized investors into social sharing platform for the combination of investment talent information and follow orders, and centered on investment talent view form fan interaction. This article around the "Shared economic environment on the impact of portfolio share on investor behavior research," the theme, the relevant literature and resources, and to detect Shared economic environment provided by the social share portfolio, whether to change the traditional information decision and disadvantages of small and medium-sized investors, whether really improved the small and medium-sized investors return on investment, its conclusion try to explain the traditional period research literature on active investment and passive investment, the relevant conclusions of small and medium-sized investors and institutional investors, sharing in the Internet the rapid development of economic period is changed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2017

Abstract The behavior of investors is often at odds with the assumptions of traditional finance theory. Research conducted over the past half-century or so abounds with examples in which the central axioms of traditional theory are systematically violated. One of the most well-established behavioral patterns in this context is the disproportionate tendency of investors to sell stocks that have appreciated in value since purchase (‘winners’) rather than stocks that have declined in value (‘losers’); this phenomenon is known as the disposition effect and most commonly attributed to Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) prospect theory. The overall aim of this doctoral thesis is to investigate the robustness of this phenomenon, its underlying mechanisms, and its potential implications for individual investors. The four independent but related essays of this thesis were designed to answer the following research questions: (1) Does the disposition effect ‘survive’ bear markets, in which investors may not be able to realize gains even if they wish to do so? (2) Is there any supporting evidence for prospect theory-based explanation of the disposition effect in the form of other observed behavior consistent with the theory? (3) Is prospect theory the most feasible explanation for the disposition effect? (4) What are the implications of the disposition effect from the point of view of individual investors? Using comprehensive data covering virtually all trades executed in the Finnish stock market during 1995–2003, this thesis demonstrates the following: (1) As robust as the disposition effect appears to be in light of previous studies, the phenomenon is only partially detected in bear markets. (2) The relationship between prospect theoretic preferences and investor behavior is not easily generalizable to other behavioral patterns besides the disposition effect. (3) In fact, even the relationship between prospect theory and the disposition effect is not as strong as is generally believed. Our results instead suggest an explanation based on escalation of commitment, according to which the disposition effect is caused above all by self-justificatory concerns. (4) Finally, although the disposition effect is generally inconsistent with economic rationality, it does not appear to be detrimental to investment performance.

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Thesis advisor: Edith Hotchkiss / Chapter one of this dissertation provides new evidence on the existence of dividend clienteles for institutional investors. We directly examine individual institutions' preferences for dividend paying stocks based on the characteristics of stocks held in their portfolio. Many institutions follow persistent investment styles, maintaining relatively high or low dividend yield portfolios over time. Institutions which hold portfolios of higher yielding stocks are significantly more likely to increase their holdings in response to a dividend increase or sell their stock in response to a decrease. For a subset of institutions, we directly observe the proportion of their portfolio managed on behalf of taxable clients. Consistent with tax-induced dividend clienteles, institutions with more taxable clients are less likely to increase their holdings in response to a dividend increase. Finally, we show that stock price reactions to announcements of dividend increases are related to characteristics of the institutions holding the stock. Our results suggest that tax status, as well as other factors are important in explaining observed clientele behavior. Chapter two explores the determinants of heterogeneity in institutional investor portfolio preferences and the relationship between institutions and the clients they serve. I find that the characteristics of an institution's clients and the characteristics of the institution itself are both important determinants of portfolio preferences and trading behavior. Specifically, I find that institutions traditionally subject to prudent investor laws are more likely to invest in high quality stocks, although, institutions sub-managing money for pension funds are less prudent than pension managers themselves. In addition, I find that institutions with taxable clients are likely to avoid unnecessary dividend taxation and turn over their portfolios less frequently. More generally, institutions exhibit systematic shifts in their exposure to common risk factors that may be explained in part by the levels and changes in client composition. While evidence for a causal link between client shifts and institutional preferences is limited to mutual funds, contemporaneous changes in clients and portfolio characteristics suggest that the dynamics of institutional investment are closely related to the nature of the clients served. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Finance.

This doctoral dissertation addresses the biological and psychological components of financial decision-making for individuals. As such, it directly examines intrinsic human traits that are related to financial performance, rather than following the standard approach of inferring said traits from aggregate market data. Specifically, this dissertation examines the relation of personality traits, testosterone levels, and cortisol levels to financial choices and outcome under short-term (trading) and long-term (investing) investment horizons. Subjects are recruited from advanced courses in finance at Florida International University. During the course of a semester (fourteen weeks) they complete a portfolio formation and rebalancing task, and answer a personality questionnaire. Additionally, subjects complete a series of trading simulations during the early morning of a preset date, and provide saliva samples. The saliva samples are analyzed for levels of testosterone and cortisol at a University lab facility. The relation of personality scores, testosterone levels, and cortisol levels to financial choices and outcomes is analyzed via linear regressions and Student’s t-tests. The results show that personality factors associated with detrimental life quality, such as paranoia, are related to long-term investment decisions associated with increased portfolio risk and return. Additionally, the levels of testosterone and cortisol play a significant role in initial portfolio formation decisions, but not in subsequent portfolio allocation decisions. As such, the results show that hormone levels contribute to initial long-term investment choices, but personality traits play a much greater role in portfolio maintenance. Alternatively, the results show that testosterone and cortisol levels play a significant role in many aspects of short-term investment, including the decision to buy or to sell, and timing preferences. Overall, the results show that hormone levels and personality traits play significant and distinctive roles in many aspects of financial decision-making. Therefore, this dissertation provides important implications for the practice and the study of finance, including information that could be used to make more rational financial choices, and to develop financial models with more realistic assumptions about investor behavior.

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Chapter one shows that US households with high unconditional and cyclical labor income risk are more leveraged and allocate a greater share of their financial assets to stocks. I use self-reported risk preferences to show that rational sorting of risk tolerant workers into risky employment is responsible for this otherwise puzzling result. With risk preferences accounted for, I find evidence that households with greater permanent income variance reduce leverage and stock allocations to an extent consistent with theory. However, household portfolios and employment selection do not respond significantly to any of the other three forms of labor income risk I measure: disaster risk, permanent income cyclicality, and permanent income variance cyclicality. Chapter two reports evidence that individual investors in Indian equities hold better performing portfolios as they become more experienced in the equity market. Experienced investors tilt their portfolios profitably towards value stocks and stocks with low turnover, but these tilts do not fully explain their performance. Experienced investors also tend to have lower turnover and disposition bias. These behaviors, as well as underdiversification, diminish when investors experience poor returns resulting from them, consistent with models of reinforcement learning. Furthermore, Indian stocks held by experienced, well diversified, low-turnover and low-disposition-bias investors deliver higher average returns even controlling for a standard set of stock-level characteristics. Chapter three shows that news reflected by industry stock returns is only gradually incorporated into stock prices in other countries. Information links between cross-border portfolios play a significant role in explaining variation in the speed of this incorporation; responses to industry news are rapid across borders where portfolios share more crosslistings, equity analyst coverage, and a greater common equity investor base. The drift in returns following cross-border industry news has halved in the past 25 years. About half of this change relates to a growth in information links and reductions in expropriations risks facing foreign investors. A simple long-short trading strategy designed to exploit gradual diffusion of industry news across borders appears profitable, but is unlikely to yield returns as high as the 8 to 9 percent annual rate the strategy has returned historically. / Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays on the role of social values in financial markets. Chapter 1 uses geographic variation in religious concentration to identify the effect of people's gambling behavior in financial market settings. We argue that religious background predicts people's gambling propensity, and that gambling propensity carries over into their behavior in financial markets. We test this conjecture in various financial market settings and find that the predominant local religion predicts variation in investors' propensity to hold stocks with lottery features, in the prevalence of broad-based employee stock option plans, in first-day returns to initial public offerings, and in the magnitude of the negative lottery-stock return premium. Collectively, our findings indicate that religious beliefs regarding the acceptability of gambling impact investors' portfolio choices, corporate decisions, and stock returns. In Chapter 2 I examine the impact of social norms against holding certain types of stocks (e.g. "sin stocks", or stocks with lottery features) on trading decisions and portfolio performance. I argue that trades which deviate from social norms are likely to reflect stronger information. Consistent with this hypothesis, I find that the most gambling-averse institutions earn high abnormal returns on their holdings of lottery stocks, outperforming the holdings of the most gambling-tolerant institutions. An analysis of institutions' sin stock holdings provides complementary evidence using another dimension of social norms, supporting the hypothesis that trades which deviate from norms reflect stronger information. In the third essay, we conjecture that people feel more optimistic about the economy and stock market when their own political party is in power. We find supporting evidence from Gallup survey data and analyze brokerage account data to confirm the impact of time-varying optimism on investors' portfolio choices. When the political climate is aligned with their political preferences, investors maintain higher systematic risk exposure while trading less frequently. When the opposite party is in power, investors exhibit stronger behavioral biases and make worse investment decisions. Investors improve their raw portfolio performance when their own party is in power, but the risk-adjusted improvement is economically small. / text

Three Essays on Stock Market Seasonality Hyung-Suk Choi 136 pages Directed by Dr. Cheol S. Eun In chapter 1, we examine seasonality in returns to style portfolios, which serve as important benchmarks for asset allocation, and investigate its implications for investment. In doing so, we consider monthly returns on the style portfolios classified by six size/book-to-market sorting and six size/prior-return sorting over the sample period 1927 - 2006. The key findings are: first, as is well documented in the literature, small-cap oriented portfolios are subject to the January effect, but also to the 'negative' September and October effects. Second, cross-style return dispersion exhibits a seasonal pattern of its own (it is largest in January and smallest in August), suggesting possibly profitable trading strategies. Third, our seasonal strategies indeed yield significant profits, as high as about 18.7 % per annum. This profit is mostly attributable to the seasonal autocorrelation in style returns. Lastly, we find substantial seasonal patterns in style returns not only in the U.S. but also in other major stock markets Germany, Japan, and the U.K. Our seasonal style rotation strategy yields economically and statistically significant profits in all of these stock markets. In chapter 2, we examine the abnormal, negative stock returns in September which have received little attention from academic researchers. We find that in most of the 18 developed stock markets the mean return in September is negative and in 15 countries it is significantly lower than the unconditional monthly mean return. This September effect has not weakened in the recent period. Further, the examinations of the various style portfolios in the US market show that the September effect is the most pervasive anomalous phenomenon that is not affected by size, book-to-market ratio, past performance, or industry. Our finding suggests that the forward looking nature of stock prices combined with the negative economic growth in the last quarter causes the September effect. Especially in the fall season when most investors become more risk averse, the stock prices reflect the future economic growth more than the rest of the year. Our investment strategy based on the September effect yields a higher mean return and a lower standard deviation than the buy-and-hold strategy. In chapter 3, we establish the presence of seasonality in the cash flows to the U.S. domestic mutual funds. January is the month with the highest net cash flows to equity funds and December is the month with the lowest net cash flows. The large net flows in January are attributed to the increased purchases, and the small net flows in December are due to the increased redemptions. Thus, the turn-of-the-year period is the time when most mutual fund investors make their investment decisions. We offer the possible sources for the seasonality in mutual funds flows.

This thesis is an attempt to advance our understanding of investor behaviour in one of the world’s largest markets, i.e. the mutual fund industry. It consists of three essays that answer the following questions: Does investor fund-selection ability explain the impressive growth of the U.K. mutual fund industry? Does the behaviour of U.S. mutual fund investors vary across the business cycle? And, how do investors react to U.S. mutual fund name changes? The first essay explores the role of investor fund-selection ability in explaining the growth of the mutual fund industry given that previous studies find that mutual funds underperform their benchmarks on average. I examine such ability in the context of the remarkable growth experienced by U.K. mutual funds during the decade of 2000-2010. Using three alternative measures of selection ability and two for performance measurement, I find that fund-selection ability is explained away by the momentum factor due to investors naively chasing recent winners. In addition, this essay is the first to examine the impact of fund visibility on selection ability. I find that fund visibility is an important factor in the investment decision-making process, and one that fund managers can potentially manipulate to their advantage. The second essay is motivated by recent findings that benchmark-adjusted returns to the fund industry are positive in periods of economic contractions. Previous literature is silent on investor behaviour in the face of superior average returns. This essay fills the gap in literature by examining investor’s fund-selection ability across the business cycle. I examine U.S. fund data from 1970-2011 and find that while genuine selection ability does not exist in any period, investors do behave differently across the business cycle. Specifically, investors no longer chase recent winners during contractions, despite no change in fund performance consistency. Instead, I find that investors are more concerned about controlling their risk exposure, especially to the market, during periods of economic downturn. The third essay examines investor reactions to U.S. mutual fund name changes, following the adoption of a new SEC ruling in 2001 to curtail misleading names. We uncover striking evidence that funds continue to undertake cosmetic name changes, and that such changes appear to mislead investors. I find that investors react more positively to cosmetic name changes than non-cosmetic ones. This result is not driven by marketing efforts. Instead, further examination reveals that this arises because cosmetic name changes frequently include industry ‘buzzwords’ in the new name, a tactic that is rewarded with higher flows to such funds. I also find that additional name changes by a fund continue to attract significant flows, although the magnitude of the flows decreases over each successive event. This essay provides compelling evidence in favour of investor irrationality and has implications for both practitioners and academics.