Three Essays on Investor Behavior and Asset Pricing

This dissertation consists of three essays on investor behavior and asset pricing. In the first chapter, I investigate the asset pricing implications of a newly-documented refinement of the disposition effect, characterized by investors being more likely to sell a security when the magnitude of their gains or losses on it increases. Motivated by behavioral evidence found among individual traders, I focus on the pricing implications of such behavior in this chapter. I find that stocks with both large unrealized gains and large unrealized losses, aggregated across investors, outperform others in the following month (monthly alpha = 0.5-1%, Sharpe ratio = 1.6). This supports the conjecture that these stocks experience higher selling pressure, leading to lower current prices and higher future returns. This effect cannot be explained by momentum, reversal, volatility, or other known return predictors, and it also subsumes the previously-documented capital gains overhang effect. Moreover, my findings dispute the view that the disposition effect drives momentum; by isolating the disposition effect from gains versus that from losses, I find the loss side has a return prediction opposite to