The COVID-19 crisis has brought to light the deeply rooted financial struggles that many people face in America, and it also exacerbated racial inequality. In particular, minority communities have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic in many ways, making them ideal targets for...

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to determine who is the most – and least – financially...

We analyze survey data on ESG beliefs and preferences in a large panel of retail investors linked to administrative data on their investment portfolios. The survey elicits investors’ expectations of long-term ESG equity returns and asks about their motivations, if any, to invest in ESG assets....

Chile, with one of the largest and best funded defined contribution programs in Latin America, held over USD $200 bn in assets at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, or more than 80% of GDP. Reacting to populist pressures during the pandemic, however, the government gave non-retired participants...

This paper investigates retirees’ optimal purchases of fixed and variable longevity income annuities using their defined contribution (DC) plan assets and given their expected Social Security benefits. As an alternative, we also evaluate using plan assets to boost Social Security benefits...

We investigate how information processing frictions contribute to household suboptimal saving and investment behavior. We find that 60% of open accounts in college 529 savings plans are invested suboptimally due to high expenses and tax inefficiency. Such investments yield an expected loss of 9%...

Objective life expectancy and subjective survival pessimism (defined as the difference between objective and subjective life expectancy) may both affect the demand for annuities. The question this project answers is: how do these two explanations contribute to annuitization decisions in...

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...

The objective of this paper is to determine Americans’ mobility patterns into and out of poverty in their later years. We track how older adults enter into and exit from poverty using the most extensive longitudinal survey on older Americans currently available, the Health and Retirement Study...

How household wellbeing responds to pandemic-induced financial shocks likely depends on whether people undertake certain actions that enhance their ability to withstand adverse economic events, along with their ability to efficiently respond to the shocks when they occur. This paper examines...