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Discussion Paper
Are People Overconfident about Avoiding COVID-19?
More than six months into the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of new cases in the United States remains at an elevated level. One potential reason is a lack of preventative efforts either because people believe that the pandemic will be short-lived or because they underestimate their own chance of infection despite it being a public risk. To understand these possibilities, we elicit people’s perceptions of COVID-19 as a public health concern and a personal concern over the next three months to the following three years within the May administration of the Survey of Consumer Expectations ...
Working Paper
Peer Pressure: Social Interaction and the Disposition Effect
Social interaction contributes to some traders? disposition effect. New data from an investment-specific social network linked to individual-level trading records builds evidence of this connection. To credibly estimate causal peer effects, I exploit the staggered entry of retail brokerages into partnerships with the social trading web platform and compare trader activity before and after exposure to these new social conditions. Access to the social network nearly doubles the magnitude of a trader?s disposition effect. Traders connected in the network develop correlated levels of the ...
Journal Article
Geographic Mobility and Consumer Financial Health: Evidence from Oil Production Boom Towns
One way a household might handle financial distress is to relocate to another area that offers greater income opportunities. This article examines the impact of geographic mobility on consumer finances by focusing on the residents of ?boom towns??areas that saw a surge of growth in oil-drilling activity around 2010 and a bust thereafter. We find that residents who move after the bust experience stronger consumer financial health than residents who stay put.
Working Paper
Growing Up without Finance
Early-life exposure to local financial institutions increases household financial inclusion and leads to long-term improvements in consumer credit outcomes. We identify the effect of local financial markets using congressional legislation that led to large and unintended differences in financial market development across Native American reservations. Individuals who grow up on financially underdeveloped reservations enter formal credit markets later than individuals from financially developed reservations and have persistently worse consumer credit outcomes (10 point lower credit scores and a ...
Working Paper
Using High-Frequency Evaluations to Estimate Discrimination: Evidence from Mortgage Loan Officers∗
We develop empirical tests for discrimination that use high-frequency evaluations to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in a conventional benchmarking test. Our approach to identifying discrimination requires two conditions: (1) the subject pool is time-invariant in a short time horizon and (2) there is high-frequency variation in the extent to which evaluators can rely on their subjective assessments. We bring our approach to the residential mortgage market, using data on the near-universe of U.S. mortgage applications from 1994 to 2018. Monthly volume quotas reduce how much ...
Working Paper
YOLO: Mortality Beliefs and Household Finance Puzzles
Subjective mortality beliefs affect pre- and post-retirement consumption and savings decisions, as well as portfolio allocation. New survey evidence shows that individuals overestimate their mortality at short horizons and survival rate at long horizons. For example, a 28-year-old male with a 99.4% chance of surviving beyond 5 years believes he will do so with 92.8% probability. A 68 year old with a 71.4% probability of living to 78 believes he has an 82.4% chance of living that long. The formation of these beliefs across age cohorts can be attributed to overweighting salient causes-of-death. ...
Journal Article
Intergenerational Homeownership and Mortgage Distress
Rates of US homeownership have declined in the past two decades, and the decline has been especially pronounced for young adults. Motivated by recent research that explores the ways in which personal experiences can affect financial attitudes and beliefs, we explore whether the negative homeownership experiences of parents during the 2008 financial crisis could have caused their children to view homeownership less favorably. We find that parental mortgage distress negatively correlates with the probability that a child will purchase a home, and we explore various channels through which this ...
Working Paper
Can Leverage Constraints Help Investors?
This paper provides causal evidence that leverage constraints can reduce the underperformance of individual investors. In accordance with Dodd-Frank, the CFTC was given regulatory authority over the retail market for foreign exchange and capped the maximum permissible leverage available to U.S. traders. By comparing U.S. traders on the same brokerages with their unregulated European counterparts, I show that the leverage constraint reduces average per-trade losses even after adjusting for risk. Since this causal approach holds constant contemporaneous market factors, these findings challenge ...
Working Paper
Legal Institutions, Credit Markets, and Economic Activity
This paper provides novel evidence on the causal connections between legal institutions, credit markets, and real economic activity. Our analysis exploits an unexplored within-country setting?Native American reservations?together with quasi-experimental variation in legal contract enforcement wherein the US Congress externally assigned state courts to adjudicate contracts on a subset of reservations. According to area-specific data on small business credit, reservations assigned to state courts, which enforce contracts more predictably than tribal courts, have stronger credit markets. ...
Working Paper
Facebook Finance: How Social Interaction Propagates Active Investing
This paper shows how active investing strategies propagate through social connections in a network of retail traders, using a new database of social activity linked to individual-level trading records. A trader?s good short-term performance causes them to contact others. A trader?s activity increases when peers perform well and increase communication. We use the staggered entry of brokerages into partnerships with the social networking platform, which is a necessary precursor for traders to access the network, to argue these effects are causal. This pattern of communication supports active ...