Extant literature consistently documents that investors tilt their domestic equity portfolios towards regionally close stocks (local bias). We hypothesize that individual investors’ local bias is not limited to the domestic sphere but instead also determines their international investment...

We analyze whether IQ influences trading behavior, performance, and transaction costs. The analysis combines equity return, trade, and limit order book data with two decades of scores from an intelligence (IQ) test administered to nearly every Finnish male of draft age. Controlling for a variety...

Recent complex financial products sold to households contradict the basic premise of canonical innovation theories: financial innovation benefits its adopters. In my 2006–2015 sample of over 28,000 yield enhancement products (YEP) the securities offer attractive yields but negative returns....

We identify a consumer bias with regard to different sources of debt-financing. Less salient debt may generate psychological benefits.This should be weighed against the possible economic costs of a suboptimal capital structure, but low levels of financial literacy make it unlikely that all...

Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt and the likelihood of financial distress among those who consider...

Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The 'experiment' of German reunification (exogenously) offered to East Germans unconditional access to (exogenously)...

This paper uses unique administrative data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation of refugees in Sweden to estimate effects of exposure to financially literate neighbors on household financial behavior. The paper contributes evidence of a causal impact of financial literacy on...

We estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation using administrative data on Swedish lottery players. A $150,000 windfall gain increases stock ownership probability among pre-lottery non-participants by 12 percentage points, while pre-lottery stock holders are unaffected....

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...

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...