The German reunification experiment provided sudden access to previously unavailable financial products, supported by knowledgeable practitioners. This setting offers new perspectives on participation, inertia, and product diffusion. Controlling for characteristics, East Germans experienced a...

The German reunification experiment provided sudden access to previously unavailable financial products, supported by knowledgeable practitioners. This setting offers new perspectives on participation, inertia, and product diffusion. Controlling for characteristics, East Germans experienced a...

Household financial decisions are complex, interdependent, and heterogeneous, and central to the functioning of the financial system. We present an overview of the rapidly expanding literature on household finance (with some important exceptions) and suggest directions for future research. We...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

We use two data sets, one from a large brokerage and another from a major bank, to ask: (i) whether financial advisors are more likely to be matched with poorer, uninformed investors or with richer and experienced investors; (ii) how advised accounts actually perform relative to self-managed...

This paper provides the first joint analysis of household stockholding participation, location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers. Our model matches observed participation, conditional and unconditional, and asset location patterns. We find that financial sophistication...

Existing studies of household stock trading using administrative data offer conflicting results: discount brokerage accounts exhibit excessive trading, while retirement accounts show inactivity. This paper uses population-wide data from PSID and SCF to examine the overall extent of household...

We use data from several waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to document credit and debit card ownership and use across US demographic groups. We then present recent theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of credit and debit card behavior. Utilization rates of credit lines and...

Most US credit card holders revolve high-interest debt, often combined with substantial (i) asset accumulation by retirement, and (ii) low-rate liquid assets. Hyperbolic discounting offers a way to resolve the former puzzle (Laibson et al., 2003). Bertaut and Haliassos (2002) sketched an...

We discuss the current state of stockownership among households in major European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK), drawing parallels and contrasts with the US experience. We use detailed microeconomic datasets and explore the extent to which observed...