Financial well-being is distinct from income. Some people with high incomes suffer low financial well-being, as their incomes fall short of their aspirations. Such people feel propelled to reach their aspirations by taking risk and willing to bear losses. Conversely, some people with low incomes...

We merge survey data on a sample of individual investors containing test-based measures of financial literacy with administrative records on their assets holding and trades before, during and after the financial crisis of September 2008. This dataset allows us to design three tests of the...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

We introduce professional financial advice in households’ choice to hold risky financial assets. Consistent with the predictions from a formal model, we present evidence that households’ trust in financial advice only matters when their perceived own financial capability is low. Instead, for...

Debt-induced crises, including the subprime crisis, are usually attributed exclusively to supply-side factors. We examine the role of social influences on debt culture, emanating from perceived average income of peers. Utilizing unique information from a household survey, representative of the...

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

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 European countries and utilizes unique data on natives and immigrants....

We merge administrative information from a large German discount brokerage firm with regional data to examine if financial advisors improve portfolio performance. Our data track accounts of 32,751 randomly selected individual customers over 66 months and allow direct comparison of performance...

Existing studies of household stock trading using administrative data offer conflicting results: discount brokerage accounts exhibit excessive trading, while retirement accounts show inactivity. This paper uses population-wide data from PSID and SCF to examine the overall extent of household...

Using a novel and unique dataset from Norway, we analyze whether professional proximity is associated with asymmetric information and abnormal returns. We find that individuals hold an excess weight in stocks that are professionally close. For example, after excluding holdings of own-company and...