Nina Klocke , Daniel Müller-Okesson , Tim Hasso , Matthias Pelster
{"title":"The impact of peer returns in social trading","authors":"Nina Klocke , Daniel Müller-Okesson , Tim Hasso , Matthias Pelster","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101057","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101057","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies the impact of peers’ performance on social traders’ trading behavior. We analyze a large sample of trading records from a social trading brokerage service that allows its investors to interact with their peers in a social-media-like setting. We investigate how individuals’ trading activities change with respect to the outcomes of their peers in the network. We show that investors’ trading activities increase in their peers’ trading performance. As a result, the trading performance decreases, and the volatility of returns increases. We exploit plausibly unexpected performance shocks to address the endogeneity concern inherent in the analysis of peer effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101057"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144088806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kick the cat? Retail investors displaced aggression: Evidence from amazon product ratings","authors":"Siqi Wei , Yanhui Zhao","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101058","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101058","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We present novel findings that the e-commerce market reflects retail investors’ displaced aggression behavior. Market return fluctuations substantially impact the distribution of ratings left by Amazon customers, most of whom invest in equity market, directly or indirectly (defined as reviewer-investors). One standard-deviation decrease in market return leads to a 1.23% reduction in the daily average rating over the following day. Reviewer-investors respond to stock market losses and gains asymmetrically: investors only react to stock market losses. Our findings are consistent with investors’ recursive preferences focusing on the trade-off between current period utility and the certainty equivalent of random future utility.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101058"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143942996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CEO’s early-life war-experience and corporate philanthropic donation: Evidence from the Korean War","authors":"Sanghak Choi , Hongmin Chun","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101061","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101061","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the influence of CEOs' early-life exposure to war on corporate philanthropic donations, focusing on the Korean War as a unique historical context. The findings reveal a significant positive relationship between CEOs' early-life war experiences and the magnitude of corporate donations, particularly among those aged six to 15 during the war and from regions with higher war severity. Robustness checks, including propensity score matching and regression discontinuity design, confirm the validity of these results. The research contributes to upper echelons and imprinting theories by demonstrating how formative traumatic experiences shape altruistic decision-making and corporate policies. Moreover, it identifies moderating factors such as financial constraints, Chaebol affiliation, and foreign ownership weaken this relationship by limiting CEOs' decision-making autonomy or resources.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101061"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144072295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Denise Laroze , Charles N. Noussair , Gabriela Fajardo , Ximena Quintanilla , Paulina Granados-Zambrano , Pedro Vallette , Mauricio López-Tapia
{"title":"Improving pension information: Experimental evidence on learning using online resources","authors":"Denise Laroze , Charles N. Noussair , Gabriela Fajardo , Ximena Quintanilla , Paulina Granados-Zambrano , Pedro Vallette , Mauricio López-Tapia","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101046","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101046","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Deciding what to do with one’s pension funds is a high-stakes, one-shot decision. Retirement schemes are often described in technical jargon that few people understand. We consider whether the learning process can be eased by providing information in video format (vs. the standard textual format) and by changes to the user interface of the websites on which individuals learn about their pension options. The results of a field experiment with 50 to 70-year-old participants and a laboratory experiment with university students both indicate that videos are significantly and substantively more effective in increasing the number of correct responses to a retirement comprehension test. The effect of changing the format from text to video on the number of correct responses is comparable to the effect of a large improvement in financial literacy. The significance of this effect is robust to changes in the content of the videos, with equivalent impact in private and public pension schemes. The study is conducted in association with the Chilean pension authority (<em>Superintendencia de Pensiones</em>) and experts from the National Social Security Organization of Chile (<em>Instituto de Previsión Social</em>).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101046"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143948796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Philipp Chapkovski , Mariana Khapko , Marius Zoican
{"title":"Gamified risk-taking","authors":"Philipp Chapkovski , Mariana Khapko , Marius Zoican","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101049","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101049","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We conduct a randomized online experiment to examine how digital nudges to hold volatile assets, a form of trading gamification, influence retail investors’ risk-taking behavior. A sample of 605 participants from four countries traded a virtual asset on an experimental platform. The gamified platform incorporates digital nudges, such as achievement badges and motivational prompts, explicitly designed to encourage holding decisions. We find that nudges significantly amplify risk-taking, particularly in high-volatility environments. The effect is most pronounced among inexperienced traders with lower financial literacy, with a one standard deviation increase in financial literacy reducing the impact by 56%.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101049"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143917553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financial literacy, risk tolerance, and cryptocurrency ownership in the United States","authors":"Fumiko Hayashi, Aditi Routh","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101060","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101060","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cryptocurrency owners without sufficient financial literacy and risk tolerance may be financially vulnerable, as the cryptocurrency market is highly volatile and lacks consumer protections. Our study divides cryptocurrency owners based on their purpose for holding cryptocurrencies—investment only (investors), transactions only (transactors), and a mix of investment and transactions (mix users)—and examines how each group correlates with financial literacy and risk tolerance compared to consumers who do not own cryptocurrencies (nonowners). Using the 2022 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, we find that investors and mix users are significantly or moderately more financially literate and risk tolerant than nonowners, but transactors are less financially literate and slightly more risk tolerant than nonowners. We also find that the three groups of cryptocurrency owners vary by demographic and financial characteristics. Our findings highlight that transactors could be particularly financially vulnerable in the absence of consumer protections in the cryptocurrency market.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101060"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143917554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fear of missing out and cryptocurrency miners: Evidence from Dogecoin and Litecoin","authors":"Geul Lee , Doojin Ryu","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101059","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101059","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We examine how fear of missing out (FoMO), defined as persistent anxiety that others might be enjoying valuable experiences from which one is absent, influences cryptocurrency miners’ behavior, focusing on Dogecoin (DOGE) and Litecoin (LTC). These two cryptocurrencies present a naturally developed experimental setting that allows us to investigate how FoMO-driven price fluctuations affect mining decisions without the need to account for additional variables such as mining costs. Our quantile vector autoregressive connectedness approach suggests that FoMO influences mining decisions. Returns influence DOGE-LTC mining participation more than vice versa when there are abrupt positive spikes in the DOGE price, whereas this tendency does not appear when LTC experiences price surges or when the DOGE price plunges. Given DOGE’s significantly stronger FoMO exposure, despite its other similarities to LTC, we interpret these findings as evidence that FoMO influences mining decisions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101059"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144088805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fintech and corporate leverage manipulation: A new explanation from the perspective of capital demands","authors":"Ruoyu Zhu , Kehu Tan , Xiaohui Xin , Qipo Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101055","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101055","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Leverage manipulation refers to fraudulent behavior in which a firm deliberately lowers its book leverage through various accounting techniques to achieve a variety of objectives. However, in the era of rapid growth of fintech, can it curb this fraudulent behavior? To answer this question, we investigate the impact of fintech on corporate leverage manipulation from the perspective of capital demands. We find that fintech can inhibit corporate leverage manipulation. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that fintech weakens firms’ incentives to manipulate leverage by lowering firms’ unreasonable excessive capital demands arising from inefficient investments and the satisfaction of management’s desires. Furthermore, the inhibiting effect of fintech on corporate leverage manipulation is more pronounced in firms with high financing constraints and in tech-industries. We shed light on the latent mechanism between fintech and corporate leverage manipulation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101055"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143902150","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tony Xiaochi Zhang , Alexander Molchanov , Harvey Nguyen , Mia Hang Pham
{"title":"Leading safely: The impact of generalist CEOs on workplace safety","authors":"Tony Xiaochi Zhang , Alexander Molchanov , Harvey Nguyen , Mia Hang Pham","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101056","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101056","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Businesses are expected to operate as responsible corporate entities, with employee safety serving as a cornerstone of this responsibility. Executives, as corporate leaders, bear moral and ethical obligations to ensure the well-being of their workforce. Drawing on human capital and upper echelons theories, we examine the influence of executives' transferable skills on workplace safety outcomes. We find that chief executive officers (CEOs) with general managerial human capital significantly contribute to the creation of safer work environments. The relation is more pronounced in firms facing financing constraints or intense market competition. These CEOs improve safety outcomes by making more prudent labor investment decisions, reducing employee workloads, and maintaining high information quality. Overall, our study underscores the pivotal role of CEOs' general managerial human capital in promoting employee well-being and mitigating the potential adverse consequences of occupational hazards on firm performance. JEL classification: J28; M12; M54</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101056"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143903878","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Qianqian Feng , Yiran Shen , Jianping Li , Xiaolei Sun
{"title":"Inter-industry risk spillovers in the Chinese stock market under epidemic outbreaks","authors":"Qianqian Feng , Yiran Shen , Jianping Li , Xiaolei Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101054","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jbef.2025.101054","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper reviews six major epidemic outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, with a particular focus on downside risk transmission among industry stock indices. Utilizing 136 Wind industry stock indices, this paper constructs marginal spillover networks and extracts transmission pathways during each outbreak, summarizing the risk accumulation and transmission characteristics. Empirical research findings indicate that during the outbreak of the pandemic, market downside risk initially spread in the healthcare sector and related industries such as pharmaceutical retail, life science tools and service. Due to the dual nature of silver as a crucial industrial raw material and a financial instrument, the silver index is more sensitive to the impact of the pandemic than is the gold index. Additionally, owing to variations in functional orientation and industry characteristics across cities, there are differences in downside risk spillovers among stock market industries following the outbreak of the pandemic.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47026,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance","volume":"46 ","pages":"Article 101054"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2025-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143864339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}