Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society. One key institution for impersonal exchange is money, which economic theory considers just a primitive arrangement for monitoring past conduct in society. If so, then a public record of past actions - or memory - supersedes the function...

We consider the advantages and disadvantages of stakeholder-oriented firms that are concerned with employees and suppliers as well as shareholders compared to shareholderoriented firms. Societies with stakeholder-oriented firms have higher prices, lower output, and can have greater firm value...

In the last few years, many of the world's largest financial exchanges have converted from mutual, not-for-profit organizations to publicly-traded, for-profit firms. In most cases, these exchanges have substantial responsibilities with respect to enforcing various regulations that protect...

The present paper introduces a new dataset, the Rand American Life Panel (ALP), which offers several appealing features for an analysis of financial literacy and retirement planning. It allows us to evaluate financial knowledge during workers prime earning years when they are making key...

We review savings trends in Italy, summarizing available empirical evidence on Italians motives to save, relying on macroeconomic indicators as well as on data drawn from the Bank of Italys Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1984 to 2004. The macroeconomic data indicate that households...

We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumer responded to the 2001 Federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that, on...

US data and new stockholding data from fifteen European countries and China exhibit a common pattern: stockholding shares increase in household income and wealth. Yet, there is a multitude of numbers to match through models. Using a single utility function across households (parsimony), we...

According to disposition effect theory, people hold losing investments too long. However, many investors eventually sell at a loss, and little is known about which psychological factors contribute to these capitulation decisions. This study integrates prospect theory, utility maximization...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy evaluation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically disprove:...