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This paper investigates the role of published stock recommendations in print and online media as investor sentiment in the near-term German stock market. In line with extant literature on other sentiment measures, vector autoregressions reveal that past stock returns drive today's sentiment, but not the other way around, and that sentiment is a powerful predictor of itself. In particular, sentiment based on printed analyst recommendations follows reversals, that is, when analysts face a stock market downturn, they see a buying opportunity and become optimistic.

We consider an alternative modelling approach to the mainstream DSGE paradigm, namely basically a Dynamic Stochastic General Disequilibrium model of continuous adjustment processes on interacting real and financial markets. We introduce heterogeneous capital gain expectations (chartists and fundamentalists) and show that the first type of agents tends to destabilise he economy. Global stability can be ensured if opinions favour fundamentalist behaviour far off the steady state. This interaction of expectations and population dynamics is bounding the real-financial market interactions, but allows for irregular behaviour within these bounds. Stability can be further improved by adding suitable policy measures.

Recent studies have found correlations between risk attitudes and several sociodemographic characteristics. In this paper, we deploy an artefactual fi eld experiment and study whether subjects - non-professionals and financial professionals - are aware of these correlations. This is largely confi rmed by our results for all subject groups. We show that the subjects attach informational value to sociodemographic information when assessing others' risk attitudes. This provides external validity to the correlations found between risk preferences and sociodemographics. A person's self-assessment of risk attitudes is the most helpful device for the subjects' assessments of others, although experienced professionals make use of it to a minor extent than all other subjects.

This paper presents a Heterogeneous Agent Model of a financial market with chartist and fundamentalist traders that exhibit bounded rationality and short-term thinking to explain the effect of under and overreaction to news. The existence of the Market Maker's finite price adjustment speed leads to the fact that prices do not adjust instantaneously to new information. Chartists use moving average rules to make their investment decisions. Chartist can transform an underreaction-only scenario into a market with overreaction. The use of long moving average rules might even make the market unstable. Furthermore, noise in financial markets can lead to long time decoupling from fundamental value. Higher market efficiency (low deviations from fundamental value), on the other hand, is achieved if high rationality and long-term thinking for the agents is assumed.

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple model based on loss aversion that can accommodatefor all of these pay-off structures in one unifying framework. We provide evidence thatloss-aversion is a likely assumption for management as well as investor preferences.Following the current empirical literature, we solve a static asset allocation problem thatincludes a nonlinear instrument. We show analytically that four different pay-off functionsmay be rationally optimal. The key parameter in determining which of these four to choosein a specific setting, is the financial planner's surplus. The notion of surplus connectshedge fund manager's incentive schemes with the idea of mental accounting as proposed inrecent behavioral finance research.