This paper produces new evidence and stylised facts on housing, wealth accumulation and wealth distribution, relying on an in-depth analysis of micro-based data on household wealth across OECD countries. The analysis addresses several questions: i) How is homeownership and housing tenure...

The experimental literature on repeated games has largely focused on settings where players discount the future identically. In applications, however, interactions often occur between players whose time preferences differ. We study experimentally the effects of discounting differentials in...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...

We study the role of risk preferences and frictions in portfolio choice using variation in 401(k) default options. Patterns of active choice in response to different default funds imply that, absent participation frictions, 94% of investors prefer holding stocks, with an equity share of...

Intertemporal tradeoffs play a key role in many personal decisions and policy questions. We describe models of intertemporal choice, identify empirical regularities in choice, and pose new questions for research. The focus for intertemporal choice research is no longer whether the exponential...

Households spent only a small fraction of their 2020 Economic Impact Payment (EIPs) within a couple of months of arrival, consistent with i) pandemic constraints on spending, ii) other pandemic programs and social insurance, and iii) the broader disbursement of the EIPs compared to the economic...

In this paper, we use micro data on a large number of European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to examine the wealth accumulation (saving) behavior of the retired elderly in Europe. To summarize our main findings, we find that less than half of the...

Older people often express regret about financial decisions made earlier in life that left them susceptible to old-age insecurity. Prior work has explored one outcome, saving regret, or peoples' expressed wish that they had saved more earlier in life. The present paper extends attention to five...

We study a retirement savings plan with a default contribution rate of 12% of income, which is much higher than previously studied defaults. Twenty-five percent of employees had not opted out of this default 12 months after hire; a literature review finds that the corresponding fraction in plans...

Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic enrollment are partially...