Learning Center

Earlier this week, we examined a pair of studies that sought to explore the relationship between the equity premium puzzle and investor behavior, specifically a behavior known as myopic loss aversion (MLA). MLA describes the tendency of investors who are loss-averse to evaluate their portfolios too frequently, thus causing them to take a short-term view...

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In many walks of life, trying to discern the lucky from the skilled can be a difficult task. For example, it seems like every time a professional sports draft occurs, debate again flares up over whether the evaluation of college (or even high school) athletes is an exercise in skill or in luck. Were the...

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As we have discussed before, one of the major problems for the first formal asset pricing model developed by financial economists, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM), was that it predicts a positive relation between risk and return. But empirical studies have found the actual relation to be flat, or even negative. Over the past...

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Research has established that dividend policy should be irrelevant to stock returns, yet investors have long demonstrated an irrational preference for them. Mutual fund providers are well-aware of this fact. Earlier this week, we reviewed a pair of studies showing that mutual fund managers exploit investors’ well-documented preference for cash dividends to attract assets by...

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It has long been known that many investors have a preference for cash dividends. From the perspective of classical financial theory, this behavior is an anomaly. The reason is that, in their 1961 paper, “Dividend Policy, Growth, and the Valuation of Shares,” Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani famously established that dividend policy should be irrelevant...

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