We show that equity market liberalizations, on average, lead to a one percent increase in annual real economic growth over a five-year period. The effect is robust to alternative definitions of liberalization and does not reflect variation in the world business cycle. The effect also remains...

We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the behavior of borrowers, who have fallen behind on their consumer loan payments. While the lender has informed all borrowers about the delinquency through an automatically generated letter, some borrowers also receive a phone call...

We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the payment behavior of delinquent borrowers. Borrowers who speak with a randomly assigned bank agent are significantly more likely to successfully resolve the delinquency relative to borrowers who do not speak with a bank agent. Call...

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 finance or economics. We conduct in-depth interviews of stock market participants and non-participants in Germany, a high-income...

Financial intermediaries often provide guarantees that resemble out-of-the-money put options, exposing them to tail risk. Using the U.S. life insurance industry as a laboratory, we present a model in which variable annuity (VA) guarantees and associated hedging operate within the regulatory...