TY  - JOUR
AU  - Barberis,Nicholas
AU  - Thaler,Richard
TI  - A Survey of Behavioral Finance
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9222
PY  - 2002
Y2  - September 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9222
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9222.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nicholas C. Barberis
Yale School of Management
135 Prospect Street
P O Box 208200
New Haven, CT 06520-8200
Tel: 203/436-0777
Fax: 203/432-6970
E-Mail: nick.barberis@yale.edu

Richard H. Thaler
Booth School of Business
University of Chicago
5807 South Woodlawn Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-5208
Fax: 773/834-9134
E-Mail: richard.thaler@chicagobooth.edu
AB  - Behavioral finance argues that some financial phenomena can plausibly be understood using models in which some agents are not fully rational. The field has two building blocks: limits to arbitrage, which argues that it can be difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less rational traders; and psychology, which catalogues the kinds of deviations from full rationality we might expect to see. We discuss these two topics, and then present a number of behavioral finance applications: to the aggregate stock market, to the cross-section of average returns, to individual trading behavior, and to corporate finance. We close by assessing progress in the field and speculating about its future course.
ER  -