This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...

Using transaction-level data from two German banks, we study the effects of smartphones on investor behavior. Comparing trades by the same investor in the same month across different platforms, we find that smartphones increase purchasing of riskier and lottery-type assets and chasing past...

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with...

Previous studies document a relationship between gambling at the aggregate level and investments in securities with lottery-like features. We combine data on individual gambling consumption with portfolio holdings and trading records to examine whether gambling and trading act as substitutes or...

Previous studies document a relationship between gambling activity at the aggregate level and investments in securities with lottery-like features. We combine data on individual gambling consumption with portfolio holdings and trading records to examine whether gambling and trading act as...

We relate time-varying aggregate ambiguity (V-VSTOXX) to individual investor trading. We use the trading records of more than 100,000 individual investors from a large German online brokerage from March 2010 to December 2015. We find that an increase in ambiguity is associated with increased...

The disposition effect is implicitly assumed to be constant over time. However, drivers of the disposition effect (preferences and beliefs) are rather countercyclical. We use individual investor trading data covering several boom and bust periods (2001-2015). We show that the disposition effect...

We investigate what statistical properties drive risk-taking in a large set of observational panel data on online poker games (n=4,450,585). Each observation refers to a choice between a safe "insurance" option and a binary lottery of winning or losing the game. Our setting offers a real-world...

A growing body of literature shows the importance of financial literacy in house-holds' financial decisions. However, fewer studies focus on understanding the determinants of financial literacy. Our paper fills this gap by analyzing a specific determinant, the educational system, to explain the...

In this paper we analyze an economy with two heterogeneous investors who both exhibit misspecified filtering models for the unobservable expected growth rate of the aggregated dividend. A key result of our analysis with respect to long-run investor survival is that there are degrees of model...