Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we...

Using a proprietary dataset of the portfolio holdings of millions of US households, we document how agents who believe in different models of the world update their beliefs heterogeneously in response to a public signal. We identify households ex ante that hold different models of the world...

Risky-asset prices are conventionally modeled as "fully (information-) revealing". Much less work has been done on how prices get to reveal information. Following the "noisy-prices", rational-expectations approach, our answer focuses on the micro-foundations of information acquisition and the...

Incentive problems make assets imperfectly pledgeable. Introducing these problems in an otherwise canonical general equilibrium model yields a rich set of implications. Asset markets are endogenously segmented. There is a basis going always in the same direction, as the price of any risky asset...

Does heterogeneity matter for asset pricing and in particular for risk premiums? Starting with an irrelevance result, I classify the literature into two groups of papers taking different routes to link investor heterogeneity and risk premiums. The first group contains models of investors who...

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...

This paper conducts the first empirical assessment of theories concerning relationships among risk taking by banks, their ownership structures, and national bank regulations. We focus on conflicts between bank managers and owners over risk, and show that bank risk taking varies positively with...

We investigate the impact of financial windfalls on household portfolio choices and risk exposure. Exploiting the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in three Swedish lotteries, we find a windfall gain of $100K leads to a 5-percentage-point decrease in the risky share of household...