[Because life annuities can increase the level and decrease the volatility of lifetime consumption, economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. One potential rational explanation is that adverse selection drives up life annuity prices, which drives down demand. We study the choice between life annuities and lump sums made by 32,000 retiring public employees. These unique data allow us to extend the existing literature by exploiting economically significant cross-sectional and time-series variation in life annuity pricing. We find little evidence that retiree demand for life annuities rises when life annuity prices fall. We find strong evidence that demand responds to salient variation in individual characteristics, such as health, and to measures of investor sentiment, such as recent equity returns.]

We document two distinct mutual fund strategies: “Swinging for the Fences” (SF), in which managers hold stocks with extreme style-adjusted returns on either tail of the return distribution, and “Batting for Average” (BA), in which managers seek stocks with consistently moderate performance. We provide evidence that these strategies are persistent and deliberate. Existing measures of active management and known asset-pricing factors do not explain the strategies. SF attracts more flow, particularly when funds mention specific stock holdings in shareholder reports. SF funds charge higher fees and hold riskier portfolios; yet, they fail to deliver higher risk-adjusted returns. In falsification tests, SF strategies are not present in passive funds, supporting our conclusion that SF and BA are intentional strategies.

The benefit of investment advice depends on the quality of advice and the investor's counterfactual portfolio. We use changes in the Oregon University System Optional Retirement Plan to highlight the impact of plan design on the counterfactual portfolios of advice seekers. When brokers are available and target date funds (TDFs) are not, brokers help participants with high predicted demand for advice bear market risk, but they recommend higher-commission options. When brokers are removed and TDFs are added, new high-predicted-demand participants primarily invest in TDFs, which offer similar market risk but higher Sharpe ratios than the broker-advised portfolios within our sample.

Because life annuities can increase the level and decrease the volatility of lifetime consumption, economists have long been puzzled by the low demand for life annuities. One potential rational explanation is that adverse selection drives up life annuity prices, which drives down demand. We study the choice between life annuities and lump sums made by 32,000 retiring public employees. These unique data allow us to extend the existing literature by exploiting economically significant cross-sectional and time-series variation in life annuity pricing. We find little evidence that retiree demand for life annuities rises when life annuity prices fall. We find strong evidence that demand responds to salient variation in individual characteristics, such as health, and to measures of investor sentiment, such as recent equity returns.

We find that the aggregate asset allocation decisions of US mutual fund investors depend on economic conditions. Both anticipated economic downturns and periods of turmoil lead investors to direct flow away from risky equity funds and towards lower-risk money market funds. These patterns are markedly stronger for investors in low cost and low turnover funds relative to investors in high cost and high turnover funds, consistent with sophisticated investors being more sensitive to changing conditions. Benchmarked against a buy-and-hold strategy, these asset allocation strategies reduce risk without degrading the risk-return trade-off. Our evidence suggests that individual investors, often dismissed as noise traders, collectively react to economic signals in a sensible manner when determining asset allocations.

The Real-Time Transaction Reporting System (RTRS) reduced the delay in reporting municipal bond trades from one-day to 15 min. We find a significant reduction in secondary market trading costs after the introduction of the RTRS. Our estimates imply that retail investors benefited primarily from reduced dealer intermediation costs, while large trades benefited from reductions in bargaining costs. Bonds experienced increases in trading volume across the liquidity spectrum. We find higher dealer capital commitment, longer intermediation chains, and fewer pre-arranged trades, all suggesting increased market-making incentives for dealers. These results are largely consistent with predictions from search-based models.