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...

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...

The question of optimal presentation format and choice architecture for investment decisions has gained momentum among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners alike. Motivated by the question how to provide information to investors in a way to improve financial decision-making, we conduct...

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...

Using a large database of complex securities, I study how salient attributes of security design distort household investment decisions. I show banks add non-standard (fine-print) conditions to artificially increase advertised rates of headline return and downside protection-a phenomenon I term...

Research in consumer psychology is essential for developing a deep understanding of how consumers make financial decisions as well as for creating solutions to improve this process. Fortunately, there has been substantial growth in research in this area among consumer behavior scholars in recent...

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...

Empirical evidence has found sources of information as an important determinant for mutual fund purchase or selection. Several researchers have found relative importance of sources of information for the retail investors. However, the literature is scanty with respect to non-retail investors....

Using data on stocks held by individual investors at retail brokerage firm Robinhood, we document that these investors are actively engaged in both momentum and contrarian trading strategies. In response to the increased volatility and uncertainty in financial markets due to the COVID-19...

We use retail Structured Equity Product (SEP) issuances to construct a new sentiment measure for individual stocks. The SEP sentiment measure predicts negative abnormal returns on the SEPs' reference stocks based on a variety of benchmarks including behavioral factor models and factors based on...