Recurrent list-price reductions of a house may signal a movement towards fair pricing or underpricing, and the impatience of sellers to enter a sell transaction more quickly. Recurrent list-price reductions may also provide a market signal that the listings are problematic and thus harder to...

Using longitudinal U.S. household data, I document that Democrats are less likely than Republicans to participate in the stock market. More importantly, the partisan gap in stock market participation widens sharply under Democratic presidencies, precisely when the stock market returns are...

The family home is the most important asset on household balance sheets, aside from human capital. Choosing a suitable mortgage is therefore critical to financial well-being but households often make costly mistakes. We collect data in an online survey to test borrowers' comfort with, and...

We elicit consumer perceptions about the interest rate associated with credit-card borrowing. Combining bank account data and surveys, we find that consumers have very noisy perceptions about the true interest costs associated with credit card debt. Total borrowing decreases with perceived...

Financial development plays a key role in economic growth, but there is limited research on how greater access to financial services affects households’ intertemporal choices. By conceptualizing intertemporal choices into utility maximization problems, this study shows that such choices are...

Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by constructing a large panel of BNPL...

Frequent, yet uninformed, fund flows in Chilean pension plans generate substantial trading in currency markets due to the high allocation to international securities. These non-fundamental flows have a significant impact on the Chilean peso, which is estimated to have a relatively low price...

We develop a life-cycle model with optimal consumption, portfolio choice, and flexible work hours for households with loss-framing preferences giving them disutility if they experience losses from stock investments. Structural estimation using U.S. data shows that the model tracks the empirical...

Poor financial capability can erode well-being in later life. To explore debt and debt management among older Americans, age 51-61, we designed and analyzed a new module in the 2018 Health and Retirement Study along with information from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study. Even though...

This paper examines the effects of stock market access, and in particular trading hours, on retail investment performance. We find that plausibly exogenous increases in trading hours are associated with meaningful declines in retail investors’ capital gains, as reported on tax returns for the...