We study the effect of political corruption on household financial well-being using microdata from the United States and China. Our identification strategy exploits recent anti-corruption campaigns in China as exogenous shocks to the perceived level of corruption held by individuals. Households...

In this paper I examine financial literacy and saving for retirement in Kenya using the household survey of 2016 from FinAccess Kenya. I use probit regressions to determine the effect financial literacy has on individuals saving regularly as well as saving for retirement. My findings show that...

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...

I investigate the relationship between lifespan expectations and household investments into risky financial assets. To credibly establish this relationship, I use natural disasters and mass shootings experiences, in the county of the household, their social network and by geographic distance,...

I test a set of predictions that constitute an identity theory of choice under risk in a set of large-scale artefactual field experiments. Male identity increases men's risk taking and beliefs even in pure games of chance with no scope for ability or skills, because identity confirmation...

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...

I examine the learning process that economic agents use to update their expectation of an uncertain and infrequently observed event. I use a new nation-wide panel dataset of large regional floods and flood insurance policies to show that insurance take-up spikes the year after a flood and then...