This paper examines heterogeneity in the responsiveness to default options in a large state retirement plan, focusing on individuals' decision-making approaches as well as their economic and demographic characteristics. Using a survey of plan participants, we find that procrastination and the...

This research project evaluates the extent of heterogeneity in time discounting among elderly Americans, as well as its role in explaining older peoples' key behaviors. We first show how older Americans evaluate simple (hypothetical) intertemporal choices in which payments now are compared with...

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we document that, controlling for observable characteristics, household investors' likelihood of entering the stock market within the next five years is about 30 percent higher if their parents or children had entered the stock market during the previous...

Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts,...

Exponential-growth bias is the tendency to neglect the compounding of interest. The economics literature has used the fact that a biased agent in many circumstances will underestimate the value of assets that grow according to compound interest. We show that the opposite can also be true. It is...

I use data from an online financial service to show that many consumers fail to stick to their self-set debt paydown plans, and argue that this behavior is best explained by present bias. Each user's sensitivity of consumption spending to paycheck receipt proxies for his short-run impatience. I...

We explore the relationship between household finances and personality traits from an empirical perspective. Specifically, using individual level data drawn from the British Household Panel Survey, we analyse the influence of personality traits on financial decision-making at the individual...

Standard program evaluations implicitly assume that individuals are perfectly informed about the considered policy change and the related institutional rules. This seems not very plausible in many contexts, as diverse examples show. However, evidence on how incomplete information affects the...

Economic theory suggests that households should invest their financial wealth in a combination of cash and a well-diversified equity portfolio. Yet, many households' equity investments are strongly concentrated in a few assets. Attempts to explain this discrepancy have included low levels of...

Building on Flavin and Nakagawa (2008), this paper models household optimal consumption and portfolio selection when consumption services are generated by both non-durable consumption and by holding a durable good housing. Housing is illiquid in that a non-convex adjustment cost must be paid...