We offer a new test of the ex ante theory of collateral. Theory states that lenders rely less on collateral if they have better information about borrowers. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and - better informed - informal lenders in a developing financial market....

This paper presents an online-experiment on overconfidence in the context of financial markets. Our subject pool consists of institutional investors, investment advisors and individual investors, all of them being registered users of a large online platform for market sentiment data. Due to...

This paper complements evidence on the Allais paradox from advanced countries and educated people by a novel investigation in a poor rural area. The share of Allais-type behavior is indeed high and related to characteristics of 'lacking ability', such as poor education, unemployment, and little...

Evidence on the effectiveness of FX interventions is either limited to short horizons or hampered by debatable identification. We address these limitations by identifying a structural vector autoregressive model for the daily frequency with an external instrument. Generally, we find, for freely...

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new...

This paper analyzes the state and impact of financial literacy in a so far largely neglected group: the middle class in emerging economies. This group is of increasing importance for implementing structural change, including the proper use of sophisticated financial products. We survey middle...

Using a large panel of individual professionals' forecasts, this paper demonstrates that good exchange rate forecasts are related to a proper understanding of fundamentals, specifically good interest rate forecasts. This relationship is robust to individual fixed effects and further controls....

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they explain an extensive set of risky behavior from a large household survey. We find overall positive correlation between items and low explanatory power in terms of behavior. Using an average of seven risk elicitation...

We show that technical indicators deliver economic value in predicting the U.S. equity premium. A crucial element of this value stems from the stability of return predictability over the full sample period from 1950 to 2013. Results tentatively improve over time and beat alternatives over...