Unpaid credit card debt can be problematic; people should avoid it where possible. Unlike prior studies, this paper examines the relative strength of the association of financial literacy, attitude towards balancing spending and savings, and financial satisfaction with credit card debt-taking...

The disposition effect is one of the most explored biases in behavioral finance, yet most papers investigating the disposition effect use data that only cover boom periods and assume that the disposition effect is constant over time. We use individual investor trading data that comprise several...

We study the effects of investment-fraud victimization using information on thousands of Ponzi scheme participants combined with register data on the Finnish population. A difference-in-differences analysis reveals the victims earn 5% less income after the scheme collapses. This persistent loss...

Digital financial services (DFS) have rapidly expanded in recent years, largely driven by fintech and further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are growing concerns that traditional financial literacy is insufficient to empower individuals to effectively access and use DFS. Digital...

How do borrowers repay their debts? In two simple debt repayment experiments, we not only elicit different types of severe deviations from optimal, i.e. debt minimizing, repayment decisions. We rather show how these deviations can be triggered using supposedly irrelevant information and find...

This study examines the take-up, use, and impact of Islamic savings accounts for poor Muslim clients of an MFI in Pakistan, using a randomized controlled trial. We specifically focus on the impact of opening Islamic savings accounts on women’s empowerment. The main results strongly suggest...

We examined the association between financial knowledge overconfidence and the perception of emergency fund needs using the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset. Only 28% of respondents reported a perceived amount of emergency funds needed that would cover at least 3 months of...

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan. Four years after hire,...

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...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...