Using customer data from a large fintech company offering “guaranteed” Euro certificates of deposits from various European banks, we document considerable heterogeneity in offered interest rates for the same maturity across and within countries for such a simple product. We find that 11% of...

What determines investors' risk-taking across macroeconomic cycles? Researchers have proposed rational expectations models that introduce countercyclical risk aversion to generate the empirically observed time variation in risk-taking. We test whether systematic deviations from rational...

We study how background health risk affects financial risk-taking. We elicit financial risk-taking behavior of a representative sample of more than 5,000 Germans in five panel waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting variation in local infections across time and space, we find that an...

We study how background health risk affects financial risk-taking. We elicit financial risk-taking behavior of a representative sample of more than 5,000 Germans in five panel waves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting variation in local infections across time and space, we find that an...

An increasing number of studies depart from the rational expectations assumption to reconcile survey expectations with asset prices. While surveys are helpful to establish a link between subjective beliefs and investment decisions, precise inference about how investors depart from rational...

In this paper we study the effects that loss contracts - prepayments that can be clawbacked later - have on group coordination when there is strategic uncertainty. We compare the choices made by experimental subjects in a minimum effort game. In control sessions, incentives are formulated as a...

We extend Lucas’s classic asset-price model by opening the stochastic process driving dividends to Knightian uncertainty arising from unforeseeable change. Implementing Muth’s hypothesis, we represent participants’ expectations as being consistent with our model’s predictions and...

Using detailed micro-level data, we show that individuals' beliefs about climate change influence their choice and level of flood insurance coverage. Our empirical strategy exploits the heterogeneous impact of widening partisan polarization on climate change beliefs after the 2016 general...

Changes in credit supply induce large and frequent variations in households' access to unsecured debt. They generate a novel financial precautionary motive, which compounds the classical motive associated with idiosyncratic income risk, as borrowers accumulate risk-free bonds to hedge against...