Incentivized experiments in which individuals receive monetary rewards according to the outcomes of their decisions are regarded as the gold standard for preference elicitation in experimental economics. These task-related real payments are considered necessary to reveal subjects' \true...

We use minutes from 17,000 financial advisory sessions and corresponding client portfolio data to study how client involvement affects advisor recommendations and portfolio outcomes. We find that advisors confronted with acquiescent clients stick to standards and recommend expensive but well...

In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in sample estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation...

Financial literacy affects wealth accumulation, and pension planning plays a key role in this relationship. In a large field experiment, we employ a digital pension aggregation tool to confront a treatment group with a simplified overview of their current pension claims across all pillars of the...

We show that financial advisors recommend more costly products to female clients, based on minutes from about 27,000 real-world advisory meetings and client portfolio data. Funds recommended to women have higher expense ratios controlling for risk, and women less often receive rebates on upfront...

Microeconomic modeling of investors behavior in financial markets and its results crucially depends on assumptions about the mathematical shape of the underlying preference functions as well as their parameterizations. With the purpose to shed some light on the question, which preferences...

We survey a representative sample of US households to study how exposure to the COVID-19 stock market crash affects expectations and planned behavior. Wealth shocks are associated with upward adjustments of expectations about retirement age, desired working hours, and household debt, but have...

We use data from a German online brokerage and a survey to show that retail investors sharply reduce risk-taking in response to nearby firm bankruptcies, which are not predictive of returns. The e.ects on trading are spatially highly concentrated, immediate and not persistent. They seem to...

We revisit the limited stock market participation puzzle leveraging a qualitative research approach that is commonly used in many social sciences, but much less so in economics or finance. We conduct in-depth interviews of stock market investors and non-investors in Germany, a highincome country...

We show that exposure to anti-capitalist ideology can exert a lasting influence on attitudes towards capital markets and stock-market participation. Utilizing novel survey, bank, and broker data, we document that, decades after Germany's reunification, East Germans invest significantly less in...