We study how and to what extent private households are affected by the recent financial crisis and how their financial decisions are in uenced by this shock. Our analysis reveals that individuals with low levels of financial literacy are less likely to have invested in the stock market and thus...

We study taxable wealth in unique Swedish administrative data, annually following a large sample of households over a period of almost 40 years. The main data limitation is non-observability of wealth for those below the tax exemption level. This implies that much of the focus of the paper is on...

Using a new nationally representative survey of financial capability and experience in the UK and Ireland, I investigate the key factors that cause individuals to experience financial distress. In this context, a key area that I focus on is whether individuals’ behavioural traits, such as...

We test the interest rate sensitivity of subprime credit card borrowers using a unique panel data set from a UK credit card company. What is novel about our contribution is that we were given details of a randomized interest rate experiment conducted by the lender between October 2006 and...

We examine the effects of presentation and information on the take-up of financial subsidies for retirement saving in a large randomized experiment carried out with H&R Block. The subsidies raise take-up and contributions with larger effects when the subsidy is characterized as a matching...

This article is centred around the notions of shareholder value orientation and financialisation. Shareholder value orientation is reflected by a high dividend payout ratio applied by firms and the reluctance of firms to finance physical investment via new equity issues. Financialisation is the...

Experimental subjects allocate $10,000 across four S&P 500 index funds. Subject rewards depend on the chosen portfolio's subsequent return. Because the investments are not actually intermediated by the fund companies, portfolio returns are unbundled from non-portfolio services. The optimal...

Retirees confront the difficult problem of how to manage their money in retirement so as to not outlive their funds while continuing to invest in capital markets. We posit a dynamic utility maximizer who makes both asset location and allocation decisions when managing her retirement financial...

We examine the effects of collateralized borrowing in a realistically parameterized life-cycle portfolio choice problem. We provide basic intuition in a two-period model and then solve a multi-period model computationally. Our analysis provides insights into life-cycle portfolio choice relevant...

We show how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to estimate welfare in insurance markets with selection. The key observation is that the same price variation needed to identify the demand curve also identifies how costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price....