This paper investigates the dynamics of individual portfolios in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth of all households in Sweden. Between 1999 and 2002, we observe little aggregate rebalancing in the financial portfolio of participants. These patterns conceal strong...

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky...

We show that reaching for yield -- a tendency to take more risk when the real interest rate declines while the risk premium remains constant -- results from imposing a sustainable spending constraint on an otherwise standard infinitely lived investor with power utility. When the interest rate is...

The welfare benefits of financial markets depend in large part on how effectively households use these markets. The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to measure accurately, and because households face constraints that are not captured by textbook...

Using a large representative sample of Indian retail equity investors, many of them new to the stock market, we show that both years of investment experience and feedback from investment returns have significant effects on investor behavior, favored stock styles, and performance. We identify two...

We study how sophisticated investors, when faced with changes in information environment, adjust their information acquisition and trading behavior, and how these changes in turn affect market efficiency. We find that, after exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures of brokerage...

This paper reviews the literature on international comparative household finance. The paper presents summary statistics on household balance sheets for 13 developed countries, and uses these statistics to discuss common features and contrasts across countries. The paper then discusses retirement...

This lecture considers the case for consumer financial regulation in an environment where many households lack the knowledge to manage their financial affairs effectively. The lecture argues that financial ignorance is pervasive and unsurprising given the complexity of modern financial products,...

We propose and implement a procedure to dynamically hedge climate change risk. To create our hedge target, we extract innovations from climate news series that we construct through textual analysis of high-dimensional data on newspaper coverage of climate change. We then use a mimicking...

This paper proposes and implements a new approach to a classic unsolved problem in financial economics: the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem of a long-lived investor facing time-varying investment opportunities. The investor is assumed to be infinitely-lived, to have recursive...