We exploit a large reform of capital-gains taxation in Germany combined with portfolio-level daily panel data to study the causal effect of taxes on individual stock-trading behavior and the disposition effect. We find substantial spikes in selling probabilities around an intertemporal tax...

This paper studies a household's optimal demand for a reverse mortgage. These contracts allow homeowners to tap their home equity to finance consumption needs. In stylized frameworks, we show that the decision to enter a reverse mortgage is mainly driven by the differential between the aggregate...

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the US to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an expert forecast about the likelihood of a...

We use data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to explore how household asset portfolios in the United States evolved between 1989 and 2016. Throughout this period, two key assets - housing and financial market assets - drove the household balance sheet evolution;...

This paper studies how peers' financial behaviour affects individuals' own investment choices. To identify the peer effect, we exploit the unique composition of the Luxembourg population and use the differences in stock market participation across various immigrant groups to study how they...

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...

The disposition effect is implicitly assumed to be constant over time. However, drivers of the disposition effect (preferences and beliefs) are rather countercyclical. We use individual investor trading data covering several boom and bust periods (2001-2015). We show that the disposition effect...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

Many models of investor behavior predict that investors prefer assets that they believe to have positively skewed return distributions. We provide a direct test of this prediction in a representative sample of the Dutch population. Using individual-level data on return expectations for a broad...

Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effective policies that decrease gender inequalities and improve women's financial literacy, agency and empowerment. Accordingly, in this paper, we adopt a multidimensional approach to measure financial...