The end result of major sporting events has been shown to affect next-day stock returns through shifts in investor mood. By studying the soccer matches that led to the elimination of France and Italy from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, we show that moodrelated pricing effects can materialize as...

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

This paper provides a systematic analysis of individual attitudes towards ambiguity, based on laboratory experiments. The design of the analysis allows to capture individual behavior across various levels of ambiguity, ranging from low to high. Attitudes towards risk and attitudes towards...

We study how consumers allocate debt across credit cards they already hold using new data on credit card activity for a representative sample of consumers with two homogeneous cards in Mexico. We find that relative prices are a very weak predictor of the allocation of debt, purchases, and...

We develop a model of an order-driven exchange competing for order flow with off-exchange trading mechanisms. Liquidity suppliers face a trade-off between benefits and costs of order exposure. If they display trading intentions, they attract additional trade demand. We show, in equilibrium,...

In this paper we investigate the influence of coupon structure on the financial behavior of Individual Investors in the fixed-income market. Examining circa 26 million decisions on 204 standard putable bonds with different coupon offerings our major findings are: (i) Products with a flat coupon...

The betting market for the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is a thin financial market, which does not attract much interest from sports bettors. Given these characteristics, it is possible that profitable wagering strategies could exist for informed bettors of the WNBA. Using...

There is consensus that the recent financial crisis revolved around a crash of the short-term credit market. Yet there is no agreement around the necessary policies to prevent another credit freeze. In this experiment we test the effects that contract length (i.e. maturity mismatch) has on the...

We examine the impact of managerial optimism on the inclusion of performance-pricing provisions in syndicated loan contracts (PSD). Optimistic managers may view PSD as a relatively cheap form of financing given their upwardly biased expectations about the firm's future cash flow. Indeed, we find...

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...