We study whether gender-biased financial advice contributes to the gender gap in pension wealth. Using administrative records from four private pension funds in Italy, we document that women are ceteris paribus 8 percentage points less likely than men to choose stock-focused investment lines at...

This paper presents a novel method for estimating treatment effects in cases where prior knowledge of the exogeneity of the treatment variable is limited. We employ a machine learning technique, double selection via Lasso, to identify a robust set of control variables without requiring prior...

The Financial Lobster Bias describes how SMEs, driven by distorted liquidity perceptions, engage in aggressive expansion until financial breakdown occurs. Using data from 10,412 Spanish SMEs (2000-2024), this study shows that liquidity misperception-measured through two versions of the Liquidity...

Decision-makers often rely on earlier actors but fail to correct for their biases. We model and measure two mechanisms: underestimating upstream bias and treating subjective information as ground truth. We link an original survey of 203 North Carolina prosecutors to their 505,787 cases....

Hiring discrimination against candidates from ethnocultural minority groups is a persistent concern in contemporary labour markets. This study examines how professional recruiters evaluate fictitious job applicants with profiles that systematically vary in signals that form ethnocultural...

This study examines the False Reality Bias in treasury management, a cognitive distortion through which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) infer financial stability from salient bank balances while overlooking pending obligations and cash-flow timing. Using a firm-level dataset of 50...