We analyze the relation between the location of a pension fund in its network and the investment performance, risk taking, and flows of the fund. Our approach analyzes the centrality of the fund's management company by examining the number of connections it has with other management companies...

We document five effects of providing individuals with crowdsourced spending information about their peers (individuals with similar characteristics) through a FinTech app. First, users who spend more than their peers reduce their spending significantly, whereas users who spend less keep...

We study a robo-advising portfolio optimizer that constructs tailored strategies based on in- vestors’ holdings and preferences. Adopters are similar to non-adopters in terms of demographics, but have more assets under management, trade more, and have higher risk-adjusted performance. The...

We estimate the cost of cultural biases in high-stake economic decisions by comparing agents' peer-to-peer lending choices with those the same agents make under the assistance of an automated robo-advisor. We first confirm substantial in-group vs. out-group and stereotypical discrimination,...

We document a little-known source of information exploited by sophisticated institutional investors: the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law that allows for the disclosure of previously unreleased information by the U.S. Government. Through FOIA requests, we identify several sophisticated...

We analyze the effects of a recent piece of consumer-protection regulation – Dodd-Frank – on mortgage originations. Dodd-Frank aimed at reducing mortgage fees and abuses against vulnerable borrowers, but increased the costs of originating mortgages. We find it triggered a substantial...

We document that, since 2011, mortgage lenders reduced credit to middle-class households by 15% and increased credit to wealthy households by 21%. Credit to low-income households was unaffected. Results hold at the individual-loan level and zip-code level, and at the intensive margin and...

We show that a model featuring an average commodity factor, a carry factor, and a momentum factor is capable of describing the cross-sectional variation of commodity returns. More parsimonious one- and two-factor models that feature only the average and/or carry factors are rejected. To provide...