Children tend to hold the same securities as their parents, but why? Using account-level data from a medium-sized retail bank, we show that shared financial advisors significantly amplify this intergenerational similarity. When parents and children have the same advisor, the likelihood that children hold a parental security more than doubles, and trading synchronization increases threefold, with 85% of synchronized trades among same-advisor pairs occurring on the very same day. Using detailed data on advisor-client contacts, we decompose this effect into cross-selling and advice spillovers within families. Both channels contribute significantly. The same-advisor effect increases with advisor distinctiveness, as measured by the deviation of her clients' portfolios from the bank-wide average portfolio, and extends to broader asset allocation decisions, in particular, adjustments in the equity share. Financial advisors emerge as important but previously unrecognized actors for the intergenerational transmission of investment behavior.

In this paper, we document that retail investors have a tendency to gamble with dividends and we show that this behavior has asset pricing implications. First, using two independent brokerage datasets, we find that investors use disproportionate fractions of dividends to buy lottery stocks and options. Second, using stock market data, we show that marketwide dividends are associated with excess price pressure in lottery stocks. Third, using two experiments, we replicate the tendency to gamble with dividends in the lab and investigate mental accounting as the mechanism behind this tendency.

Conflicts of interest in financial advice have, particularly since the Great Financial Crisis, received considerable regulatory attention. In this paper, we exploit a unique HNWI dataset with an open decision architecture, where clients get to choose between a) receiving portfolio advice or not and b) a fee model with conflicted fees, or an all-in fee model. Seeking empirical evidence for theoretical model implications of Inderst and Ottaviani (2012), we find that results rather align with ”naiıve” clients according to the model, than ”wary” clients despite the above-average financial sophistication of HNWI. We thus add the HNWI perspective to a literature focused on retail investors.