A tradition from Knight (1921) argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but perform worse. We test these predictions with two risk tolerance proxies: stock market participation and personal leverage. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we...

When entering retirement most people face the decision whether they would like their defined contribution account balance paid as a lump sum or to annuitize the amount. The fact that people tend to choose the lump sum even if economic reasons suggest not to is called the annuity puzzle. In a...

An intense debate on the use of limited-voting shares developed in the UK during the 1950s. Using a unique hand-collected dataset, we show that negative news coverage of limited-voting shares is associated with an increase in the relative price of voting and limited-voting shares (the voting...

Stock market investment decisions of individuals are positively correlated with that of co-workers. Sorting of unobservably similar individuals to the same workplaces is unlikely to explain our results, as evidenced by the investment behavior of individuals that move between plants. Purchases...

We conduct a laboratory experiment in which we expose participants to situational social norms of approval or disapproval of lying. While participants on average conform to the situational pressure, the results highlight important differences in individual reactions. Situational norms crowd out...

We propose a method to produce density forecasts of the term structure of government bond yields that accounts for (i) the possible mispecification of an underlying Gaussian Affine Term Structure Model (GATSM) and (ii) the time varying volatility of interest rates. For this, we derive a Bayesian...

Studies of bond return predictability find a puzzling disparity between strong statistical evidence of return predictability and the failure to convert return forecasts into economic gains. We show that resolving this puzzle requires accounting for important features of bond return models such...

Three mutually uncorrelated economic disturbances that we measure empirically explain 85% of the quarterly variation in real stock market wealth since 1952. A model is employed to interpret these disturbances in terms of three latent primitive shocks. In the short run, shocks that affect the...

The single most important policy-induced innovation in the international financial system since the collapse of the Bretton-Woods regime is the institution of the European Monetary Union. This paper provides an account of how the process of financial integration has promoted financial...

Theoretical asset pricing models routinely assume that investors have heterogeneous information. We provide direct evidence of the importance of information asymmetry for asset prices and investor demands using plausibly exogenous variation in the supply of information caused by the closure or...