Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), I document that childhood experience of father's job loss decreases the propensity to own stocks as an adult. If this experience takes place at the age of 5–10 years, the probability of owning stocks decreases by 2.9 percentage points...

Empirical evidences show that investors tend to be biased toward investing indomestic (home bias) and local (local bias) stocks. Familiarity is considered to be one of thereasons. A similar concept was proposed by Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999, 2002), known asthe recognition heuristic: “when...

We review the theoretical and empirical literature on commitment devices. A commitment device is any arrangement, entered into by an individual, with the aim of making it easier to fulfill his or her own future plans. We argue that there is growing empirical evidence supporting the proposition...

Given the substantial amount of resources currently invested in microcredit programs, it is more important than ever to accurately assess the extent to which peer monitoring by borrowers faced with group liability contracts actually reduces moral hazard. We conduct a field experiment with women...

Empirical evidences show that investors tend to be biased toward investing in domestic (home bias) and local (local bias) stocks. Familiarity is considered to be one of the reasons. A similar concept was proposed by Goldstein and Gigerenzer (1999, 2002), known as the recognition heuristic: "when...

We examine experimentally the effect of complexity on individual decision making. We focus on credit choices, as they have been widely criticized for their complexity in recent years. In a first study, we find that complexity in benefits leads to random mistakes, while complexity in costs leads...

We explore the relationship between household finances and personality traits from an empirical perspective. Specifically, using individual level data drawn from the British Household Panel Survey, we analyse the influence of personality traits on financial decision-making at the individual...

While commitment devices such as defaults and direct deposits from wages have been found to be highly effective to increase savings, they are unavailable to the millions of people worldwide who not have a formal wage bill. Self-help peer groups are an alternative commitment device that is...

Financial disclosure documents provide investors with product details to facilitate informed investment decisions. We investigate whether the appearance - the visual frame - of disclosure documents impacts risk and return expectations and investment behavior. In our experiment, subjects decide...

Most evidence of hyperbolic discounting is based on violations of either stationarity or time consistency as observed in choice experiments. These choice reversals may however also result from time-varying discount rates. Hyperbolic discounting is a plausible explanation for choice reversals...