We use a panel of more than 100,000 investor accounts in US stocks over the period 1991-1995 to construct an investor-based measure of dispersion of opinion, unlike the analyst based measure used in the literature. We use this measure to test two competing hypotheses: the sidelined investors...

This study examines the diversification decisions of more than 60,000 individual investors during a six year period (1991-96) in recent U.S. capital market history. The majority of investors in our sample are under-diversified and the extent of under-diversification is more severe in retirement...