Latest Publications (Link to Google Scholar)

Research on Social Trading

 

In my research on social trading I study the interaction-based relations of traders from a large social trading platform and how the behavior of investors changes due to social interactions. For example, in Pelster and Hofmann (2018), we show that peer-to-peer advisors are more susceptible to the disposition effect.

 

 

Research on Investor Trading Behavior

Coronavirus

 

Using brokerage data, I study the trading behavior of retail investors together with co-authors. For example, in a recent paper, I investigate the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on investors' trading activities (Ortmann et al., 2020). My results show that investors significantly increase their trading activities as the pandemic unfolds, both at the extensive and at the intensive margin. The number of investors who first open a brokerage-account increases, while at the same time established investors increase their average trading activities.

In other work in this area, I study, for example, the impact of terrorist activity on retail investors' trading activities (Hasso et al., 2020). Moreover, I study the background of cryptocurrency investors (Hasso et al. 2019) and their motivation to engage in cryptocurrency trading (Pelster et al. 2019). I also study the effect of investors' cultural background on the disposition effect in Breitmayer et al. (2019).

 

Research on Banking, Financial Penalties, and Regulation

My research studies the effects of financial penalties as well as bank capital, regulation, and supervision on the stock performance and systemic risk of global banks. For example, in Köster and Pelster (2017), we show that announcements of financial penalties are accompanied with increased stock performance. more

 

 

 

Dependency Structures and Their Implications for Asset Pricing

This project is concerned with the implications of dependency structures on asset pricing. Pelster and Vilsmeier (2018) considers the importance of (non-linear) dependency structures in asset pricing for the case of CDS contracts and shows that CDS price dynamics can be mainly explained by factors describing firms' sensitivity to extreme market movements. Pelster and Schertler (2019) show that, beyond conventional hedging, issuers of structured financial products exploit cross-pricing and cross-issuance of warrants and discount certificates as risk management tools.

 

Other Publications