I show that disruptions to personal sources of financing, aside from commercial lending supply shocks, impair the survival and growth of small businesses. Entrepreneurs holding deposit accounts at retail banking institutions that defaulted following the financial crisis reduce personal borrowing...

We study the effect of political corruption on household financial well-being using microdata from the United States and China. Our identification strategy exploits recent anti-corruption campaigns in China as exogenous shocks to the perceived level of corruption held by individuals. Households...

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...

The increase in alternative working arrangements has sparked a debate over the positive impact of increased exibility against the negative impact of decreased financial security. We study the prevalence and determinants of intermediated work in order to document the relative importance of the...

We study risk taking in a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China - before, during the COVID-19 crisis, and after the country reopened. Subjects in our sample traveled for semester break in January, generating variation in exposure to the virus and quarantine in Wuhan. Higher exposure leads subjects...

This study examines whether heterogeneous beliefs contribute to the incidence of the disposition effect. We measure optimism using elicited beliefs from incentivized experiments and surveys and link these measures to investment decisions using administrative register data. We find that...