We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the behavior of borrowers, who have fallen behind on their consumer loan payments. While the lender has informed all borrowers about the delinquency through an automatically generated letter, some borrowers also receive a phone call...

In a panel survey of brokerage clients in the United Kingdom, participants mostly perceive their own portfolio as no more volatile than the market portfolio. Taking into account observed portfolio betas, this implies a belief in very low idiosyncratic portfolio volatility, which is even negative...

There are many decisions that Americans have to make about retirement before, at, and after retirement. For example, Americans have to decide when to start saving for retirement, how much to save, how to invest those savings, when to retire, when to claim social security, and how to take...

We relate Google search volumes, proxying for economic concerns of households (FEARS), to individual investor trading. The trading data come from a large German brokerage covering more than 100 thousand investors over ten years. When FEARS is high, individual investors are on the sell side of...

In this paper, we disentangle investor sentiment into two components: mood and household attitudes towards the economy. We apply acoustical analysis to the daily top ten of music downloads in iTunes for Germany to derive a novel and direct measure for mood. We match this novel mood index with...

We evaluate the income elasticity of the aggregate budget share spent on a sub-group of commodities, in a competitive framework, by a continuum of agents having the same income, but heterogeneous behavior described by an "homothetic preferences scaling factor" having a bounded Pareto...

We elicit money illusion and match it with financial and sociodemographic data from official registers on a quasi-representative sample of the Danish population. We find that people who are more prone to money illusion hold more of their gross wealth in nominal assets, including bank deposits...

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. We offer an explanation for this violation of the Law of One Price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case...

This research project evaluates the extent of heterogeneity in time discounting among elderly Americans, as well as its role in explaining older peoples' key behaviors. We first show how older Americans evaluate simple (hypothetical) intertemporal choices in which payments now are compared with...

We study how personal experiences affect individual risk taking. To separate the intertwining effects of personal experiences and wealth changes, our identification strategy relies on the decision to keep or rebalance unexpected inheritances of risky assets. Experience derives from investments...