Target Date Funds (TDFs) provide retirement investors, many of whom are unsophisticated or inattentive, with age-appropriate exposures to different asset classes like stocks and bonds. To maintain exposures, TDFs trade actively against market returns, buying stock funds when the stock market...

Using a randomized controlled trial we test how retail investors assess and update their priors based on different types of financial advice, which either aligns with their priors or goes against it. We compare advice that emphasizes either the benefits of passive investment strategies (such as...

Using a proprietary dataset of the portfolio holdings of millions of US households, we document how agents who believe in different models of the world update their beliefs heterogeneously in response to a public signal. We identify households ex ante that hold different models of the world...

This paper documents the share of investable wealth that middle-class U.S. investors hold in the stock market over their working lives. This share rises modestly early in life and falls significantly as people approach retirement. Prior to 2000, the average investor held less of their investable...

In data from an account aggregator, households increase consumption when they receive (expected) tax refunds, as if they are liquidity constrained. However, this behavior is not due to liquidity constraints or hand-to-mouth behavior. These same households smooth consumption when making payments...

One of the basic motives for saving is the accumulation of wealth to insure future welfare. Both introspection and extant research on consumption insurance find that people face substantial risks that they do not fairly pool. In theory, the consumption and wealth accumulation of price-taking...

This paper employs a synthetic cohort technique and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to construct average age-profiles of consumption and income over the working lives of typical households across different education and occupation groups. Using these profiles, we estimate a structural model of...

Using variation in minimum wages across cities and controlling for differences in business-cycle factors and long-run local economic trends, we find that following minimum wage increases, both prices and nominal spending rise modestly. These gains are larger for certain sub-categories of goods...

We develop a machine-learning solution algorithm to solve for optimal portfolio choice in a detailed and quantitatively-accurate lifecycle model that includes many features of reality modelled only separately in previous work. We use the quantitative model to evaluate the consumption-equivalent...

Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation in amount, receipt, and timing of receipt of Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) authorized by the CARES Act, this paper estimates that people spent less of their EIPs in the few months following arrival than in similar previous policy episodes and...