This study examines whether financial literacy affects stock market participation. We use data from the Preference Parameter Study, a nationwide survey in Japan, made by Osaka University. Our results show that financial literacy significantly improves stock market participation even after...

This paper investigates the relationship between the propensity to seek for professional advice, financial knowledge and overconfidence, as well as the determinants of financial knowledge and overconfidence for a representative sample of Italian financial decision makers. The demand for...

We document strong persistence in the performance of trades of individual investors. The correlation of the risk-adjusted performance of an individual across sample periods is about 10 percent. Investors classified in the top performance decile in the first half of our sample subsequently...

Households hold undiversified stock portfolios of firms headquartered near their city of residence. Leading explanations assign a causal role for proximity. The literature neglects that distance is endogenous. Households may locate based on unobservables such as optimism about a city's economic...

We analyze household stock market participation and allocation in a survey covering 19 European countries. We jointly control for all relevant variables from prior studies, which typically focus on one at a time, and omit risk-aversion. Excellent full model predictive power decomposes into...

We explore how an understudied factor, portfolio composition, affects investors' trading preferences and whether it is associated with the Disposition Effect. Behavioral lab experiments reveal predictable trading patterns depending on salient holding amounts in the portfolio, and the latter's...

Product advertising captures the attention not only of consumers but also of investors. Constructing a measure of local investment interest in stocks from Google searches and using the Super Bowl as an experiment, we study the effects of advertising expenses on investor attention. We find that...

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example refers to consumers who transfer the entire balance from an existing credit card account to a new account, but use the new card for...

Trusting behavior has been shown to affect households' portfolio choice between risky and risk-free financial assets. We extend the analysis of the effect of trust on portfolio choice to include the dominant component of households' portfolios, real estate. In a simple model, we show how the...