Theoretically, wealthier people should buy less insurance, and should self-insure through saving instead, as insurance entails monitoring costs. Here, we use administrative data for 63,000 individuals and, contrary to theory, find that the wealthier have better life and property insurance...

Trust is an essential element of individuals' willingness to engage in economic activity such as investment. Because cultural institutions influence individuals' trust, I examine whether shocks to trust in a prominent cultural institution have crossover effects on households' investment...

While student loans continue to be a hot topic from economic, political, and social perspectives, and recent research has focused on the individual outcomes and macroeconomic effects of student borrowers, this paper focuses on a different group of borrowers – parent borrowers, specifically...

This paper presents survey results on the incidence of IRA ownership in the United States and the activity of IRA-owning households. In mid-2020, 37 percent of US households owned individual retirement accounts (IRAs), most commonly traditional IRAs. More than eight in 10 IRA-owning households...

This study explores financial knowledge patterns from 2009 to 2018, focusing on objective and subjective knowledge, overconfidence in financial knowledge, and “Don’t know” responses. We used four waves of National Financial Capability Study (NFCS) datasets. Objective financial knowledge...

Employing representative data from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, we disprove the hypothesis that cryptocurrency investors are motivated by distrust in fiat currencies or regulated finance. Compared with the general population, investors show no differences in their level of...

The combined supply and demand shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic have created the largest shift in consumer behavior in recent history, while exposing millions of households to material hardships like food insecurity and housing instability. In this study, we draw on national surveys conducted...

We extend previous studies of retirement adequacy by testing the effect of financial sophistication on projected retirement adequacy. In an analysis of the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset, we found that only 42% of households are adequately prepared for retirement compared to 58%...

Although research on credit card debt in developed countries has identified predictors of debt among college students, it is unknown whether these same predictors apply in emerging markets, such as Brazil. To examine this issue, a total of 1257 college students, 814 from Brazil and 443 from the...

Using data on the portfolio holdings and income of millions of U.S. retirement investors, I find that positive and persistent shocks to income lead to a significant increase in the equity share of investor portfolios, while increases in financial wealth due to realized returns lead to a small...