We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors' expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time. These effects are related to how the brain's...

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...

People believe that, even in very large samples, proportions of binary signals might depart significantly from the population mean. We model this "non-belief in the Law of Large Numbers" by assuming that a person believes that proportions in any given sample might be determined by a rate di...

Individual investors select high-fee index mutual funds despite the fact that the future payouts are nearly identical. We offer an explanation for this violation of the Law of One Price based on investor desire to diversify. While diversification in some settings may be beneficial, in the case...

The basic paradigm of asset pricing is in vibrant flux. The purely rational approach is being subsumed by a broader approach based upon the psychology of investors. In this approach, security expected returns are determined by both risk and misvaluation. This survey sketches a framework for...

We analyze the long-standing “annuity puzzle” through the lens of behavioral economics. We provide novel evidence that lessens the extent of the puzzle and shed some additional light on the real drivers of the decision to annuitize. Last, we discuss the policy implications of our findings

Financial innovations have resulted in an explosion in the number of so-called structured products being offered in the retail marketplace. To explain the complex structure of these hybrid debt securities, their prospectuses frequently employ numerical examples to illustrate the investment's...

This is the long version of presentation slides on "Attention, Psychological Bias, and Social Interactions." Many of the psychological biases studied in behavioral finance derive from limited cognitive processing power. I will discuss a general framework for modeling limited attention and...

Many of the psychological biases studied in behavioral finance derive from limited cognitive processing power. I will discuss a general framework for modeling limited attention and economic decisions, and applications to financial issues. I will then turn to how limited attention and other...