The tremendous rise of artificial intelligence and the use of ChatGPT enables the unprecedented rapid spread of various messages. The fundamental problem at present is the spread of false, unverified news and information known as fake news. This great challenge of the modern world causes...

The central role of the media for people's minds and for capital markets has been analyzed by a broad range of literature, nourished from several strands of academic research. Applying a vector autoregression on a unique set of TV news, consumer sentiment and excess flows of mutual funds, I find...

The increase in the equity risk premium during the 2007–2009 Great Recession and the aging of the baby boomers in the United States have led analysts and financial industry experts to believe that risk aversion among stock investors has moved to a more-permanently higher range. If so, stocks...

This research identifies investors’ environmental tastes as an explanation of the pollution premium in asset pricing. Showing that stocks of firms with higher toxic emissions earn higher risk-adjusted returns in the cross-section of the US stock market, we find that environmental tastes are...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

This study explores decision-making processes of promoters of financial products and financial advice services. We collect experimental evidence about how these professionals perceive their customers' needs, preferences, and biases. By focusing on the behavioral differences between expert (621)...

The Web is the largest human information construct in history transforming our society. How can we understand, measure and model the Web evolution in order to design effective policies and optimize its social benefit? Early measurements of the Internet traffic and the Web graph indicated the...

We examine how word-of-mouth learning may lead to uniform and possibly inefficient actions in finite time among a network of agents. In our model, agents are identically informed a priori and observe network neighbors’ actions as well as the payoffs of some or all of those actions (a...