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...

There is increasing interest in applying lessons learned from household finance to the design of regulation, both within and across international borders. However, household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial...

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...

We conduct field experiments with retail investors recruited from a social trading platform. In our main experiment, we first elicit beliefs about the returns to active investing. We then generate exogenous variation in beliefs by providing treated respondents with information about index funds...

Cross-cultural studies in finance have often used country-wise data for cultural values. Our objective was to understand how individual differences in cultural values affect an investor's stock trading behavior in an emerging market. Based on the theory of planned behavior, we conceptualized a...

We survey a representative sample of U.S. individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. We find substantial support for many factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share, particularly background risk, investment horizon, rare...

The question of optimal presentation format and choice architecture for investment decisions has gained momentum among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners alike. Motivated by the question how to provide information to investors in a way to improve financial decision-making, we conduct...

This paper examines the effect of broadband Internet on household stock market participation. By exploiting the expansion of broadband in the U.S. from 1999 to 2008, we find that the availability of broadband in a household’s zip code significantly increases the likelihood of stockholding and...

We survey clients of a German online bank to study retail investors' beliefs about the autocorrelation of annual returns of the aggregate stock market, and the role of these beliefs in financial decisions. A majority of our respondents believe in mean reversion of aggregate returns, and these...

It is known that investors over-invest in "home" assets. Yet, there is much debate on whether superior information or sentiment drives this behavior. Using the sports-betting market as a real-market laboratory, we find individuals exhibit a bias toward home-team wagers, which does not yield...