Many economically important settings, from financial markets to consumer choice, involve dynamic decisions under risk. People are willing to accept risk as part of a sequence of choices---even when it is fair or has a negative expected value---while at the same time rejecting positive-expected...

We document a robust dynamic inconsistency in risky choice. Using a unique brokerage dataset and a series of experiments, we compare people's initial risk-taking plans to their subsequent decisions. Across settings, people accept risk as part of a “loss-exit” strategy—planning to continue...

We develop empirical tests for discrimination that use high-frequency evaluations to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in a conventional benchmarking test. Our approach to identifying discrimination requires two conditions: (1) the subject pool is time-invariant in a short time...

We present empirical evidence of the propagation of active investment strategies within a network of retail traders. Using a new, proprietary database drawn from a Facebook-style social network for individual investors, we verify the assumptions behind Han and Hirshleifer (wp, 2012). In their...

This research is the first to provide empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent amongst active rather than passive investors. While previous empirical work, spearheaded by Hong, Kubik, and Stein (2004), shows that proxies for sociability are related to participation in asset...

Consumers seek restitution for disputed financial services by filing complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). We find that filings from low-socioeconomic (i.e., low-income and African American) zip codes were 30% less likely to be resolved with the consumer receiving...

We develop tests for discrimination that we apply to 25 years of mortgage lending. Our tests limit the scope for omitted variables in a conventional benchmarking test by combining high-frequency mortgage evaluations with the notion that economic incentives can mitigate subjective biases. Loan...

Early-life exposure to local financial institutions increases household financial inclusion and leads to long-term improvements in consumer credit outcomes. We identify the effect of local financial markets using Congressional legislation that led to unintended differences in financial market...

We study the effect of subjective mortality beliefs on life-cycle behavior. With new survey evidence, we document that survival is underestimated by the young and overestimated by the old. We calibrate a canonical life-cycle model to elicited beliefs. Relative to calibrations using actuarial...