This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

Not only has credit card lending in Asia grown rapidly, but also several episodes of sharp booms and busts have been experienced, posing new risks to financial stability. Policymakers need to learn more about the risks arising from this type of consumer lending and respond with appropriate...

This research studies whether individuals make choices consistent with expected utility maximization in allocating wealth between a lifetime annuity and a phased withdrawal account at retirement. The paper describes the construction and administration of a discrete choice experiment to 854...

Potential fraud can limit the promise of innovative mobile financial markets like Mobile Money, yet little is known about its existence, especially among the poor. In a randomized control trial across 6 low-income communities in Ghana, I evaluate the extent of fraud — overcharged transactions...

While increased financial literacy may improve individual retirement savings decisions, modifying the placement of key information in retirement savings statements can produce further improvements. We examined the extent to which placement of information and financial literacy affected the...

How does gaining access to expensive credit affect the well-being of credit-constrained households? I use plausibly exogenous zip code level variation in the temporal accessibility of payday loans to examine the causal effects of access to payday loans on household well-being. Using suicide...

We study the impact of loan-to-value regulation on supply and demand for unregulated debt that is used for home acquisition. In our setting, part of the dwelling price is in the form of pre-existing debt exempt from the regulation. Variations in the latter prior to the LTV regulation generated...

Inspired by the field experiment in Bertrand and Morse (2011), the state of Texas adopted an information disclosure for consumers taking out payday loans starting in January, 2012. The disclosure compares the cost of payday loans with other credit products, and presents their likelihood of...

We conducted a choice experiment to investigate whether retirement savers follow simple portfolio theory when choosing investments. We modeled experimental survey data on 693 participants using a scale-adjusted version of the latent class choice model. Results show that underlying variability in...

Here we test the usefulness of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) for identifying individuals who consistently exhibit concave utility over returns to wealth, despite variations in the framing of risk. At the same time, we test the relative strengths of nine standard descriptions of investment...