Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance最新文献

This paper examines the effect of air pollution on individual lenders' decisions. Using unique data from the leading peer-to-peer lending platform, we find evidence that for every 10 units increase in the air quality index (AQI), the lender would lend RMB 5.47 yuan more in one single bid and 6% earlier in the fund-raising period. Moreover, the impacts from PM2.5 and CO pollutants are serious. The older people and people that are not well-educated would significantly suffer from air pollution. We further explore three potential mechanisms: physical channel, physiological channel as well as psychological channel, and show that the first two are valid. Overall, our findings shed light on the influence of environmental factors on online lending participants.

We investigate the role that weather-induced mood plays in underperformance of lottery stocks. We hypothesize that during pleasant weather conditions, investors are more likely to become risk-taking and optimistic, and invest more in lottery stocks. This results in overpricing and lower expected return for these stocks. We use sky cloud cover as a proxy for the weather condition and show that the MAX effect mainly exists following sunny weather; however, there is less evidence for the MAX anomaly following cloudy weather. Our finding is robust to using alternative constructions of MAX and skewness measures as well as other proxies for weather condition such as rain, wind and temperature.

This paper documents that fund investors’ behavior is biased by the physical attractiveness stereotypes that they hold about fund managers. In an experimental setting, we find that although there is no information about highly attractive fund managers outperform their peers, respondents still perceive highly attractive managers to possess superior management skills and are willing to allocate more money to their managed funds. We further find that provision of information in contrast to the assumptions associated with physical attractiveness stereotypes diminishes the bias in investor behavior. When less attractive managers have historical returns that are 4% higher than more attractive managers, investors’ preference for attractive faces is overridden. Empirical evidence obtained using fund market data is consistent with our experimental results.

The study develops an original interdisciplinary approach, leveraging complex networks through which it identifies groups of investors and projects in equity crowdfunding, investigates whether clientele effects arise resulting in specific investor-entrepreneur matching, and explores which investor-entrepreneur combinations can lead to the emergence of collective behaviors. Data about campaigns and investors are gathered from Crowdcube to identify investors and company types that populated this leading UK platform during its early years (2011–2016). Results show that the clientele effect exists only between specific investors and project types: serial investors are attracted to innovative companies, whereas high-value and small investors, representing the largest group in the crowd, prefer mature companies in the consumer product industry. Moreover, the study reveals that information exchange in certain matching drives the clientele effect, resulting in collective behavior on specific segments: small investors engage in collective behaviors only when targeting high-tech innovative companies. These findings provide a new view on the clientele effect in equity crowdfunding platforms and the financing of innovative companies.

This study introduces a novel bidirectional ripple effect method to identify the risky center, hedging center, and duration of ripple effects. This method is used to examine the static and dynamic ripple effects among NFTs using idiosyncratic volatility measures. The findings indicate that, overall, correlations and bidirectional ripple effects among NFTs are prominent over the sample period. Only a few NFTs are significant ripple centers. Decentraland is a significant risky center, while CryptoVoxels serves as a reliable hedging center. The outcomes of rolling window tests and durations reveal that the central role of NFTs varies over time. The findings also show that ripple effects have significant durations. These conclusions hold considerable importance for NFT investors in making investment choices and managing risks.

SoJump.com (wjx.cn; in short: SoJump) is a survey company that allows researchers to build and deploy inexpensive online surveys in China. Here we evaluate SoJump’s data quality and similarity to the national benchmark. In the first study, we compare SoJump’s performance in China to MTurk’s performance against national benchmarks in the United States and India. In the second study, we compare three Chinese platforms in two-wave panel studies. We conducted the panels on SoJump, Credamo (SoJump’s major competitor), and Cint (national benchmark). We included attention and comprehension checks, economic games, cognitive tasks, and a framing experiment. We find that SoJump’s sample is younger, better educated, more urban, higher-income, and more female than Cint, similar to MTurk in the U.S. and India. Compared to Credamo, SoJump is more similar to Cint both for data quality and behavior. We conclude that SoJump is appropriate to inexpensively access nationally diverse samples in China.

An experimental study with a sample (N = 213, 49.8% male, 18-year-old or above) indicates that investment performance measures based on drawdown duration can capture investors’ preference when other investment measures focusing on risk-adjusted returns such as the Sharpe ratio fail to. Based on the result, the prevention-focused investors are found to be more sensitive to, and easily affected by the number of drawdown days than the promotion-focused investors. Performance measures based on drawdown duration can supplement traditional performance measures to capture investors’ preference.

While ESG is a relatively recent concept, the traditional Japanese business philosophy of Sanpo-yoshi, which prioritizes harmonious relationships with stakeholders over profitability, has been deeply ingrained in Japan's corporate culture for more than three centuries and has contributed to the longevity of Japanese businesses. Despite the lasting impact of Sanpo-yoshi on Japanese corporate culture and its similarities to the ESG framework, there is a notable absence of literature examining its influence on the ESG performance of Japanese companies. With a sample of Japanese listed companies from 2001 to 2018, this study reveals that top management born in regions heavily influenced by Sanpo-yoshi are more likely to exhibit better ESG performance. The importance of national culture in elucidating the variations observed in ESG performance is highlighted by our findings, which carry significant policy implications.

The main motivation of this study is the absence of consolidated measures to evaluate individuals' perceptions of financial freedom. So, this study has the objective of constructing and validating a Financial Freedom Perception Scale (FFPS). Furthermore, it seeks to provide the first evidence for differences in the perception of financial freedom according to gender, age, race and formal education. The research was developed by two main phases. The qualitative phase consisted of interviews, expert validation, and pre-test used to define the scale and the construction of the items. In the quantitative phase, two samples were collected: one with 1020 cases for exploratory analysis and another of 2293 respondents for confirmatory validation. The tests validated the FFPS as a one-dimensional scale consisting of nine items assessing the individual's financial freedom perception. We also present an application methodology for FFPS. We identified that a significant portion of the population perceives itself as financially free, but this perception is quite distinct among citizens of different profiles. The FFPS can be useful for academics, researchers, public managers, and financial agents. It can also indicate the results of public policies on financial inclusion, income transfer, and financial literacy.

Being truthful in financial decision-making often implies giving up higher monetary rewards associated with acting dishonestly. Is this trade-off affected by acute stress? We ran an experimental study to answer this question. Using three separate tasks to measure honesty, we examined whether decision-making in this context is influenced by a) the intrinsic value that subjects assign to honesty, b) the size of earnings achievable dishonestly, and c) by being acutely stressed (vs. in a neutral state) when making these decisions. Our main results show that subjects’ stated preference for honesty in general, the magnitude of financial rewards, and their interaction predict honest decision-making. However, their effects are immune to acute stress, which did not significantly alter honest decision-making. This finding is important when one considers that many financial decisions are taken by stressed managers and that there are significant costs associated with implementing ethical policies within corporations.