We study how investors respond to inflation combining a customized survey experiment with trading data at a time of historically high inflation. Investors' beliefs about the stock return-inflation relation are very heterogeneous in the cross section and on average too optimistic. Moreover, many...

Older people often express regret about financial decisions made earlier in life that left them susceptible to old-age insecurity. Prior work has explored one outcome, saving regret, or peoples' expressed wish that they had saved more earlier in life. The present paper extends attention to five...

We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We provide evidence of a powerful barrier to social learning: people are much less sensitive to information others discover compared to equally-relevant information they discover themselves. In a series of incentivized lab experiments, we ask participants to guess the color composition of balls...

For decades, households' subjective expectations elicited via surveys have been considered meaningless because they often differ substantially from the forecasts of professionals and ex-post realizations. In sharp contrast, the literature we review shows household characteristics and the ways in...

Almost 50 million Americans are burdened by the need to repay almost $2 trillion in student loan debt, while at the same time having to save for retirement. This article analyzes the potential impact of the 2022 SECURE 2.0 Act reform which permits employers to match contributions for student...

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...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...

I survey the advice given by the fifty most popular personal finance books and compare it to the prescriptions of normative academic economic models. Popular advice frequently departs from normative principles derived from economic theory, which should motivate new hypotheses about why...