We report the results of an experiment designed to study the effect of individual asset-holdings restrictions on the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets. Bubbles and crashes are a quite robust phenomenon in experimental settings. Motivated by demand-control policies...

We survey thousands of affluent American investors to examine the relationship between personalities and investment decisions. The Big Five personality traits correlate with investors' beliefs about the stock market and economy, risk preferences, and social interaction tendencies. Two...

'Epidemiological' models of belief formation put social interactions at their core; such models are widely used by scholars who are not economists to study the dynamics of beliefs in populations. We survey the literature in which economists attempting to model the consequences of beliefs about...

Information provision, choice simplification, social messaging, active-choice frameworks, and automatic enrollment all increase retirement savings. However, gauging the relative efficacy of these approaches is challenging because the supporting evidence spans widely different institutional...

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis by attending "bottom up" to...

We study exposure to pollution information and investment portfolio allocations, exploiting the rollout of air quality monitoring stations in India. Using a triple-differences framework, we show that retail investors' investments in "brown" stocks are negatively related to local air pollution...

This paper experimentally studies the effects of competition in an environment where people's actions can not be contractually fixed. We find that, in comparison with no competition, the presence of competition does neither increase efficiency nor does it yield any gains in earnings for the...