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...

Uruguay implemented an ambitious financial inclusion program that included a fiscal stimulus through VAT rebates and subsidies for point of sale (POS) adoption. One of its main provisions banned cash payment of wages and social benefits and forced financial institutions to open wage-accounts...

Lost and forgotten retirement savings accounts are increasingly becoming a problem. This paper uses proprietary data, survey data, and a field experiment to study the effect of two campaigns to raise awareness and direct attention to this issue among account holders. The first campaign is based...

This paper empirically studies how college savings motives affect household stock market participation. More than 65% of households saving for college allocate at least a portion of their college savings to stocks, which are also the most popular class of risky assets for college savings...

This paper investigates the possible opportunity cost of using standard college savings plans against the advantages of using debt to pay for college. In addition, it presents a practical argument for using debt in place of college savings plans in certain instances.By doing so, investors may...

Tax-qualified vehicles helped U.S. private-sector workers accumulate $25Tr in retirement assets. An often-overlooked important institutional feature shaping decumulations from these retirement plans is the "Required Minimum Distribution" (RMD) regulation, requiring retirees to withdraw a minimum...

Fintech is rapidly changing the landscape for financial services in terms of accessibility and affordability, especially in this post-COVID era. Digital finance now has the potential to be a game changer for the nearly two billion financially excluded persons in the developing and emerging...

In the 2010s, the Korean government revised the Income Tax Act to increase the tax burden for retirement income paid in a lump sum. The reform gradually increased the tax from 2015 to 2020. In addition, if a plan member transfers retirement income to the individual retirement pension account to...

Most financial advisors recommend storing three to six months of expenses in liquid assets in case of an emergency. Yet we estimate that more than half of U.S. families do not have at least three months of their non-discretionary expenses in liquid savings. We find that financial literacy is...

How do households adjust savings and consumption in response to liquidity from debt relief? I study this question using policy variation induced by federal student loan forbearance in the 2020 CARES Act and an individual-level panel of daily financial transactions for 315,000 borrowers....