I show that disruptions to personal sources of financing, aside from commercial lending supply shocks, impair the survival and growth of small businesses. Entrepreneurs holding deposit accounts at retail banking institutions that defaulted following the financial crisis reduce personal borrowing...

More than 20 million Americans are affiliated with Multi-Level Marketing firms (MLMs), but there is little empirical evidence on who participates in this controversial part of today's labor market. We link data on 350,000 individuals cited in an FTC settlement with one of the largest MLMs to...

We educate investors with significant dividend holdings about the benefits of dividend reinvestment and the costs of misperceiving dividends as additional, free income. The intervention increases planned dividend reinvestment in survey responses. Using trading records, we observe a corresponding...

We report the results of a longitudinal intervention with students across five universities in China designed to reduce online consumer debt. Our research design allocates individuals to either a financial literacy treatment, a self-control training program, or a zero-touch control group....

In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households' expectations about the recovery, and the impact of the shock on individuals' economic...

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe the investment behavior of individuals who invest in cryptocurrencies with...

We survey a representative sample of US households to study how exposure to the COVID-19 stock market crash affects expectations and planned behavior. Wealth shocks are associated with upward adjustments of expectations about retirement age, desired working hours, and household debt, but have...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...

We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in exposure to the virus and quarantine in Wuhan. Higher exposure leads subjects...