Can concern with relative standing, which has been shown to influence consumption and labor supply, also increase borrowing and the likelihood of financial distress? We find that perceived peer income contributes to debt ...

The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of ...

"Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The ""experiment"" of German reunification ...

We examine the relationship between household wealth and self-control. Although self-control has been linked to consumption and financial behavior, its measurement remains an open issue. We employ a definition of self-control ...

In a field study with more than 1.500 customers of an online-broker we test what happens when investors receive repeated feedback on their investment success in a monthly securities account report. The reports show investors’ ...

Cryptocurrencies have received growing attention from individuals, the media, and regulators. However, little is known about the investors whom these financial instruments attract. Using administrative data, we describe ...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers’ consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio ...

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 ...