This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (GSOEP-IS). This motivates a laboratory...

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is more risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2,100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression and also when we control for a...

The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP...

Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in...

We show that technical indicators deliver stable economic value in predicting the U.S. equity premium over the out-of-sample period from 1966 to 2014. Results tentatively improve over time and beat alternatives over a large continuum of sub-periods. By contrast, economic indicators work well...

Recent efforts to reduce international tax evasion focus on information exchange with tax havens. Using bilateral bank data for 1,397 country pairs in a balanced quarterly panel from 2003:I - 2017:IV, we first show that information-on-request treaties with tax havens reduce bank deposits in tax...

We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how robustly they explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex...

In a meta-analysis of 126 impact evaluation studies, we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior and, to an even larger extent, financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of randomized experiments (RCTs). However, intervention impacts are highly...

While financial inclusion is typically addressed by improving the financial infrastructure we show that financial literacy, representing the demand-side of financial markets, also has a beneficial effect. We study this effect at the cross-country level, which allows to consider institutional...

This RCT examines the effect of a new style finance training during which participants are given personalized feedback on their financial business outcomes in addition to a "rules-of-thumb" training approach. We compare this to the effects of a "rules-of-thumb" training by itself and to a...