We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counter-factual techniques to decompose observed...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey representative of the Dutch...

Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The ‘experiment' of German reunification (exogenously) offered to East Germans unconditional access to (exogenously)...

The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of European countries and utilizes unique data on natives and immigrants....

We use two administrative data sets, from a large internet broker and from a major commercial bank, together with regional data to ask three questions: (i) whether financial advisors tend to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer, experienced but presumably busy investors;...