We identify the S-Shaped consumption utility by reconciling consumption decisions with asset returns. Different from the concave-shaped utility, the S-shaped consumption utility predicts a possible negative correlation between low quantiles of consumption growth and asset returns, for which we...

We administer a survey to thousands of affluent Americans about their personalities and investments. The Big Five personality traits can explain the heterogeneity among investors in their beliefs about the stock market and economy, risk preferences, and social-interaction tendencies. Two...

Maximizing output without taking into consideration the negative externalities generated, including the harm to the mental and physical health of the population creates psychological stress. Focusing on the bellwether indicators of economic performance including working more, generating income,...

Maximizing output without taking into consideration the negative externalities generated, including the harm to the mental and physical health of the population creates psychological stress. Focusing on the bellwether indicators of economic performance including working more, generating income,...

Do emotional responses to the spread of an infectious disease affect the quality of economic decision-making? In the context of an episode of heightened public concern about Ebola in the US in October 2014, I document that worrying about the possibility of an epidemic can impair cognitive...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

Investors' return expectations are pivotal in stock markets, but the reasoning behind these expectations remains a black box for economists. This paper sheds light on economic agents' mental models - their subjective understanding - of the stock market, drawing on surveys with the US general...

I examine how financial markets interact with news about the COVID-19 pandemic. A twelve topic model optimizes the trade-off between number of topics and topic coherence. Using this model, I show that before mid-March 2020 markets react more to the same quantum of news when volatility is higher...

Republicans start more firms than Democrats. Using a sample of 27 million party-identified Americans between 1997 and 2017, we find that 8% of Republicans and 5% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative...

Why are stock prices much more volatile than the underlying dividends? The excess volatility of prices can in principle be attributed to two different causes: time-varying discount rates for expected future dividends, arising from variation in risk premia; or the irrational exuberance of...