The welfare benefits of financial markets depend in large part on how effectively households use these markets. The study of household finance is challenging because household behavior is difficult to measure accurately, and because households face constraints that are not captured by textbook...

This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky...

We model a financial market in which investor beliefs are shaped by representativeness. Investors overreact to a series of good news, because such a series is representative of a good state. A few bad news do not change investor minds because the good state is still representative, but enough...

We introduce the model of asset management developed in Gennaioli, Shleifer, and Vishny (2012) into a Solow-style neoclassical growth model with diminishing returns to capital. Savers rely on trusted intermediaries to manage their wealth (claims on capital stock), who can charge fees above costs...

We present a standard model of financial innovation, in which intermediaries engineer securities with cash flows that investors seek, but modify two assumptions. First, investors (and possibly intermediaries) neglect certain unlikely risks. Second, investors demand securities with safe cash...

Using a large representative sample of Indian retail equity investors, many of them new to the stock market, we show that both years of investment experience and feedback from investment returns have significant effects on investor behavior, favored stock styles, and performance. We identify two...

We show that reaching for yield -- a tendency to take more risk when the real interest rate declines while the risk premium remains constant -- results from imposing a sustainable spending constraint on an otherwise standard infinitely lived investor with power utility. When the interest rate is...

We examine the business model of traditional commercial banks in the context of their co-existence with shadow banks. While both types of intermediaries create safe "money-like" claims, they go about this in different ways. Traditional banks create safe claims by relying on deposit insurance,...