We survey a representative sample of Finnish individual investors to rank the importance of 37 factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share and compare the results to a recent US survey (Choi and Robertson, Journal of Finance, 2020). Investors in both countries regard years until...

Persistent financial concerns often lead to poor mental health, which is why we need to better understand which factors contribute to it. I elicit determinants of household heads' and non-household heads' expected financial distress after the sudden energy-price hike in the UK in 2021 and find...

We show that incorporating defined benefit pension funds in an asset pricing model with incomplete markets improves its ability to jointly match the historical equity premium and riskless rate, and has important implications for risk sharing. We emphasize the importance of the pension fund's...

This paper studies gold return expectations of households and professional forecasters. The asset pricing literature emphasizes that gold is no macroeconomic hedge. However, employing survey data, I document that households believe gold to be a good investment when they expect bad times....

The rise in inflation since mid-2021 to multi-decade highs presents a worrying trend for households’ financial health, particularly if nominal incomes, or non-inflation adjusted income, of financially vulnerable families lag behind prices. Policymakers have noted that lower income households...

This study documents how investors extrapolate from recent stock returns of locally headquartered firms when forming beliefs about aggregate stock market outcomes. Consistent with studies on the equity home bias, we find that the responsiveness to local information is a function of proximity....

We examine the effects of broker geography, i.e., the location of a brokerage’s financial advisor workforce, on the geography of retail trading in the stocks that the broker’s analysts cover. We find that retail investors are significantly more likely to trade and own stocks that are covered...

Mindfulness, the meditative process of non-judgmentally focusing on the present, has gained popularity as an accessible and efficacious cognitive behavioral therapy. We experimentally examine whether state mindfulness affects individuals' preferences and financial choices. By shifting...

This chapter provides an overview of how digital technologies are transforming the financial services landscape. We highlight the latest in digital financial product and service offerings related to payments and transfers, savings and investments, borrowing, and risk management. We then consider...

The well-documented nonparticipation in the stock market by many households and the highly negative correlation between stock and housing investment are puzzling. We show that stock and housing markets are cointegrated, and thus households significantly increase housing expenditure, reduce stock...