With medical expenditures constituting an increasingly large share of private spending, the continuing policy debate on health care reform in the United States is a potentially important source of households' financial uncertainty. To quantify the implications of this uncertainty for the real...

This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on consumer credit outcomes. We develop a local measure of economic uncertainty capturing county-level labor market shocks. We then exploit microeconomic data on mortgages and credit-card balances together with the crosssectional variation...

This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the effect of health care policy uncertainty (HCPU) on households’ portfolio choice. A causal identification approach is developed, whose key assumption is the existence of an exogenous variable that shifts responsiveness to HCPU without shifting...

Using new employer-employee matched data, this paper investigates the impact of uncertainty, as measured by idiosyncratic stock market volatility, on individual outcomes. We find that firms provide at best partial insurance to their workers. Increased firm-level uncertainty reduces total...

This paper studies a household's optimal demand for a reverse mortgage. These contracts allow homeowners to tap their home equity to finance consumption needs. In stylized frameworks, we show that the decision to enter a reverse mortgage is mainly driven by the dierential between the aggregate...

This paper tests whether staying ignorant about the negative consequences of one's own actions affects agents' performance in a real effort experiment. We conducted treatments in which subjects' effort either increased only one's own payoff or also increased the donation to a bad charity....

We identify the causal effect of cognitive abilities on economic behavior in an experimental setting. Using a forecasting task with varying cognitive load, we identify the causal effect of working memory on subjects' forecasting performance, while also accounting for the effect of other...

We study reputational herding in financial markets in a laboratory experiment. In the spirit of Dasgupta and Prat (2008), career concerns are introduced in a sequential asset market, where wages for investors are set by subjects in the role of employers. Employers can observe investment...

We investigate the consequences of imperfect data privacy on information acquisition of personal health data. In a game of persuasion with ex-ante symmetric information players decide on whether or not to acquire and reveal information about their personal health status to convince a decision...

Game theory predicts that players make strategic commitments that may appear counter-intuitive. We conducted an experiment to see if people make a counter-intuitive but strategically optimal decision to avoid information. The experiment is based on a sequential Nash demand game in which a...