Recent literature promotes commitment products as a new remedy for overcoming self-control problems and savings constraints. Committing to a welfare-improving contract requires knowledge about one's preferences, including biases and inconsistencies. If agents are imperfectly informed about their...

We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microentrepreneurs in Chile. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of...

This paper studies to what extent the experiences of households shape their willingness to take financial risks. It follows the methodology of Malmendier and Nagel (2011) and applies it to a novel data set on household finances covering euro area households. We show that experienced stock market...

Worldwide, people are gaining access to a formal bank account, which allows account-based instead of cash payments. Based on a novel randomized control trial, we document that the payment method is an important determinant of savings behavior. In rural India, we study the effect on savings of...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have an asymmetric distribution of outcomes. In a series of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate the asymmetry or ignore it completely. Participants...

A growing share of the world population is getting access to a formal bank account. This allows a move from cash to account based payments. Grounding our hypothesis in behavioral economics, we conjecture that being paid on an account instead of in cash can play a major role in encouraging...

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...

This paper uses proprietary data comprising of 4,155 participants who attended financial education seminars conducted by a major U.S. consumer credit counseling agency in 2007. In this study, knowledge gained from attending the seminars is estimated using a multivariate regression model. Results...

This study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine whether self-regulation, proxied by regularly dining together with family, is associated with better financial preparedness and greater wealth accumulation across time among households. Findings reveal that individuals who...

Legen Menschen ihre Ersparnisse in Finanzprodukte an, etwa um für ihr Alter vorzusorgen, machen sie davon in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß ihre künftige finanzielle Lebenslage abhängig. Die Finanzbranche bewirbt zahlreiche und hinsichtlich ihres Verlustrisikos stark variierende...