This is a doctoral dissertation. Personal financial planning is an interdisciplinary practice that draws many of its tools and techniques from the fields of finance, economics, law, taxation, and investment theory. The profession's body of knowledge is dominated by research devoted to these...

While financial knowledge is strongly positively related to household wealth, there is also considerable cross-sectional variation in both financial knowledge and net asset levels. To explore these patterns, we develop a calibrated stochastic life cycle model featuring endogenous financial...

To what extent individual choices are influenced by media exposure? We try to provide evidence on this aspect considering how the sales of lotto tickets are determined by the size of the top prize (the jackpot) compared to the amount of attention that media devote to the game. We use data on the...

The paper addresses the issue of “fake news” through a well-known and widely studied experiment that illustrates possible uses of economics and game theory for understanding the phenomenon. Public news is viewed as an aggregation of decentralized pieces of valuable information about complex...

In complex insurance contracts, individuals can use sophisticated strategies to avoid out-of-pocket expenses. Sophistication and expected claims are affected by similar factors, creating a systematic positive or negative correlation between them. Depending on this correlation, sophistication can...

Consumers claim to hate marketing - mostly, because they get too much unwanted marketing. In response, regulators develop medium-by-medium marketing suppression regulations. Unfortunately, these ad hoc solutions do little to satisfy consumers, and dynamic technologies and business practices...

Efficient diffusion of economic information plays a critical role in the functioning of society, and, more specifically, households. We study information diffusion between spouses in a representative sample of the German population. We focus on an important economic belief: the household's...

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...

Systemic approach to communication concerns that it could be captured in its dynamic, under the influence of its determining components, with a complexity greater than its component parts. In this sense, communication is considered an open system, being influenced by the context in which it...

We investigate how job displacement affects whom men marry and study implications for marriage market matching theory. Leveraging quasi-experimental variation from Danish establishment closures, we show that job displacement leads men to break up if matched with low-earning women and to re-match...