This chapter provides an overview of household finance. The first part summarizes key facts regarding household financial behavior, emphasizing empirical regularities that are inconsistent with the standard classical economic model and discussing extensions of the classical model and...

Household finance—the normative and positive study of how households use financial markets to achieve their objectives—has gained a lot of attention over the past decade and has become a field with its own identity, style, and agenda. In this chapter we review its evolution and most recent...

We use responses to a self-report survey and matched trading data to investigate the effects of personality (Big Five traits), IQ and financial literacy on individuals’ stock trading portfolios. Traits have small but significant effects: openness and extraversion are associated with...

1 Wealth Accumulation Is an Attitude Investing for your future requires a few goals and much less capital than you think -- 2 Saving to Invest is the Best Strategy -- 3 COVID Hit Women’s Finances Much Harder than Men’s Women left the worforce en masse – at what cost? -- 4 It’s True!...

We study the effects of broadband internet use on the investment decisions of individual investors. A public program in Norway provides plausibly exogenous variation in internet use. Our instrumental variables estimates show that internet use causes a substantial increase in stock market...

We investigate the role of financial advice in shaping the composition of household portfolios in Great Britain. Advice is associated with a reallocation of wealth away from real estate and towards bonds and stocks, especially when households seek financial advice "for investments". Having a...