We use unique data fromfinancial advisers’ professional exam scores and combine it with other variables to create an index of financial sophistication. Using this index to explain long-term stock return expectations, we ...

A setting in which customer-owned mutual companies converted to publicly listed firms created a plausibly exogenous shock to salience of stock ownership. We use this shock to identify the effect of stock ownership on ...

Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt ...

We test whether investor mood affects trading with data on all stock market transactions in Finland, utilizing variation in daylight and local weather. We find some evidence that environmental mood variables (local weather, ...

This paper investigates risk-taking in the liquid portfolios held by a large panel of Swedish twins. We document that the portfolio share invested In risky assets is an increasing and concave function of financial wealth, ...

We show that the optimal consumption of an individual over the life cycle can have the hump shape (inverted U-shape) observed empirically if the preferences of the individual exhibit internal habit formation. In the absence ...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios ...

We employ a unique identification strategy linking survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank-level data to estimate the effects of bank financial distress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures. We ...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique ...

We explore the sources of household balance sheet adjustment following the collapse of the housing market in 2006. First, we use microdata from the Federal Reserve Board’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey to document ...