This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. In a lab experiment, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate income expectations by letting income depend on relative...

We develop and implement a new measure for inequality aversion: two peers are endowed with identical binary lotteries and the only choice they make is whether they want to play out the lotteries independently or with perfect positive correlation (coupling). Coupling has no other e ect than...

We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via a quantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatments have, on average, sizeable impacts on financial knowledge (+0.33 SD), similar to educational...

Evidence on the effectiveness of FX interventions is either limited to short horizons or hampered by debatable identification. We address these limitations by identifying a structural vector autoregressive model for the daily frequency with an external instrument. Applying this approach to the...

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment...

The use of technical analysis by financial market professionals is not well understood. Thispaper thus analyzes survey evidence from 692 fund managers in five countries, the vast majorityof whom rely on technical analysis. At a forecasting horizon of weeks, technical analysis isthe most...

The G20 summits in 2009 have proposed major changes in governance of the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF). Most important seems to be the acknowledgment that the IMF in itscurrent form lacks legitimacy and ownership. Accordingly, the G20 suggests a reallocation ofvoting shares to emerging and...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentivecompatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The surveymeasure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentallyderived risk attitude. This holds...

This paper examines the relative information shares of the Bund, i.e. the ten-year Euro bondfuture contract on German sovereign debt, versus two futures with shorter maturity. We findthat the Bund is most important but does not dominate price discovery. The other contractsalso have relevant –...

This paper examines the puzzlingly high unexploited momentum returns from a new perspective.We analyze characteristics of momentum traders in a sample of 692 fund managers. Wefind that momentum traders are “defined” by their short-term horizon, by a behavioural viewon the market and by a...