We employ recent Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) microdata from the US to analyze the impacts of confidence in one's own financial knowledge, confidence in the economy, and objective financial literacy on investment in risky financial assets (equity and bonds) on both the extensive and...

Participation in the stock market is limited, especially early in life. By contrast, human capital investment is widespread, especially early in life. Returns to equity are constant across households, while returns to human capital vary. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that once...

Using only daily data on bond and stock returns, we identify and characterize flight to safety (FTS) episodes for 23 countries. On average, FTS days comprise less than 3% of the sample, and bond returns exceed equity returns by 2.5 to 4%. The majority of FTS events are country-specific not...

I show that, due to imperfect risk sharing, aggregate shocks to uncertainty about idiosyncratic return on investment generate economic contractions with elevated risk premia and a decrease in the risk-free rate. I present a tractable real business cycle model in which firms experience...

The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift from active to passive investment strategies. We examine how this shift affects financial stability through its impacts on: (i) funds' liquidity and redemption risks, (ii) asset-market volatility, (iii) asset-management industry...

The recent financial crisis has focused attention on identifying and measuring systemic risk. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate the portfolio composition of banks as function of daily interbank trades and stock returns. While banks’ assets are reported to regulators...

I exploit a natural experiment to show that household investment decisions depend on the manner in which information is displayed. Israeli retirement funds were prohibited from displaying returns for periods shorter than twelve months. In this setting, the information displayed was altered but...