Does the provision of leverage to retail traders improve market quality or facilitate socially inefficient speculation that enriches financial intermediaries? This paper evaluates the effects of 2010 regulations that cap the provision of leverage to previously unregulated U.S. retail traders of...

We document a robust dynamic inconsistency in risky choice. Using a unique brokerage dataset and two preregistered experiments, we compare people's initial risk-taking plans to their subsequent decisions. In both settings, people accept risk as part of a "loss-exit" strategy-planning to continue...

We present empirical evidence of the propagation of active investment strategies within a network of retail traders. Using a new, proprietary database drawn from a Facebook-style social network for individual investors, we verify the assumptions behind Han and Hirshleifer (wp, 2012). In their...

This research is the first to provide empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent amongst active rather than passive investors. While previous empirical work, spearheaded by Hong, Kubik, and Stein (2004), shows that proxies for sociability are related to participation in asset...

Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices---even when it is fair or has a negative expected value---while at the same time rejecting positive-expected...

We examine how wealth windfalls affect self-employment decisions using data on cash payments from claims on Texas shale drilling to people throughout the United States. Individuals who receive large wealth shocks (greater than $50,000) have 51% higher self-employment rates. The increase in...

How do persistent cash flow shocks affect debt repayment across the distribution of households? Using individual data on natural gas shale royalty payments matched with credit bureau data for 215,639 consumers, we estimate that individuals repay 33 cents of debt per dollar of windfall, and that...

We show that constraints can improve financial decision-making by disciplining behavioral biases. In financial markets, restrictions on leverage limit traders' ability to borrow to open new positions. We demonstrate that regulation which restricts the provision of leverage to retail traders...

Early-life exposure to local financial institutions increases household financial inclusion and leads to long-term improvements in consumer credit outcomes. We identify the effect of local financial markets using Congressional legislation that led to unintended differences in financial market...

We study the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on life-cycle behavior. With new survey evidence, we document that survival is underestimated by the young and overestimated by the old. We calibrate a canonical life-cycle model to elicited beliefs. Relative to calibrations using actuarial...