A tradition from Knight (1921) argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but perform worse. We test these predictions with two risk tolerance proxies: stock market participation and personal leverage. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we...

Stock market behavior of individual investors is highly correlated with stock market behavior of their co-workers. For example, a ten percentage point increase in the fraction of co-workers that purchase stocks in a given month is associated with a two percentage point increase in the likelihood...