Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...

Digital financial services (DFS) have rapidly expanded in recent years, largely driven by fintech and further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are growing concerns that traditional financial literacy is insufficient to empower individuals to effectively access and use DFS. Digital...

The field of academic finance has grown and evolved in the 47 years since the Journalof Financial Economics (JFE) began publishing papers. This paper examines detailed dataon the 3,003 papers written by 3,358 different authors published in the JFE over the period1974–2020. Advances in...

We consider an investor who is looking to maximize their probability of remaining solvent throughout their lifetime by using an algorithm that aims to optimize their investment allocation strategy and optimize their tax strategy for withdrawal allocations between tax deferred accounts (TDAs),...

This paper quantifies the amount of noise and bias in analysts' forecast of corporate earnings at various horizons. We first show analyst forecasts outperform statistical forecasts at short-horizons, but underperform at longer horizons. We next decompose the relative accuracy of these forecasts...

Modern life offers nearly unbridled access to information; it is the harnessing of this information to guide decision-making that presents a challenge. We study how one individual may try to shape the way another person interprets objective information by proposing a causal explanation (or...

Previous studies document a relationship between gambling at the aggregate level and investments in securities with lottery-like features. We combine data on individual gambling consumption with portfolio holdings and trading records to examine whether gambling and trading act as substitutes or...

I present a theory of investor selling behavior in which the disposition effect arises because investors are slow to update their beliefs about the values of the assets they hold. I show numerically that the theory generates a disposition effect, propensity to sell functions, and other trading...

Using a large panel of U.S. brokerage accounts trades and positions, we show that a large fraction of retail investors trade as contrarians after large earnings surprises, especially for loser stocks, and that such contrarian trading contributes to post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) and...