Finding ways to encourage investments in renewable electricity production is crucial to reach a transition to a sustainable energy system. While in the energy policy literature, investments are usually explained by economic or regulatory policies, recent studies have suggested that some investors are boundedly rational and may respond differently to policies. In this paper, a framework is propo...

This paper offers a quantitative description of European private equity markets and compares the recent development in these markets with the development of the US venture capital market. European markets for private equity vary considerably with respect to the investments in young high-technology enterprises, as well as with respect to the types of passive investors who invest capital in priva...

After negative shocks, investors with short trading horizons are inclined or forced to sell their holdings to a larger extent than investors with longer trading horizons. This may amplify the effects of market-wide shocks on stock prices. We test the relevance of this mechanism by exploiting the negative shock caused by Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008. Consistent with our conjectu...

Using data from a new field experiment in South Korea, we study how information from virtual communities such as stock message boards influences investors’ trading decisions and investment performance. Motivated by recent studies in psychology, we conjecture that investors would use message boards to seek information that confirms their prior beliefs. This confirmation bias would make them more...

The conjecture that investor sentiment leads important groups of investors to act similarly and thereby affect prices is an important ingredient of models of noise trading and style investing. In contrast to Lakonishok et al. (1992), who find only weak evidence of herding among institutional investors and conjecture that retail investors will herd even less, we document that a sample of over 30...

Anchor Investors in IPOs In July 2009, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) permitted a version of bookbuilding in which IPO managers solicit bids from and allocate allocations to anchor investors in the IPO pre-market, subject to disclosure of the price, quantity, and identity of anchors participating in the pre-market bookbuilding. We obtain share allocation data in anchor IPOs. ...

At the time of an initial public offering, shares in a firm are typically held by venture capitalists, insiders, corporate investors, and angel investors. We examine the role of angel investors in the IPO process. We find that angel investors provide equity capital in industries that venture capitalists are less likely to serve and that shareholders in angel backed IPO firms are more likely to ...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the trading behavior and the impact of new investors on the bubble surrounding the Baosteel call warrant, the first derivative traded in China after a nine-year suspension. First, we find that the new investors initiated the bubble. Second, echoing common wisdom, we empirically show that the continuous entries of new investors sustained the bubble. T...

When assessing a fund manager’s skill, sophisticated investors will consider all factors (priced and unpriced) that explain cross-sectional variation in fund performance. We investigate which factors investors attend to by analyzing mutual fund flows as a function of recent returns. Investors attend most to market risk (beta), but treat returns attributable to size, value, momentum, and industr...

This paper examines responses from a survey of 2,000 randomly selected mutual fund investors who purchased shares from six different distribution channels. The survey provides data on the demographic, financial, and fund ownership characteristics of mutual fund investors. It also provides data on investors’ knowledge of the costs and investment risks of mutual funds and the information sources ...