Research

My research spans household finance, behavioral economics, consumer credit, and financial institutions. I use high-quality microeconomic data, such as credit bureau records, brokerage accounts, and administrative datasets, to study how individuals and institutions make financial decisions and what the consequences are for welfare and policy.

Research topics

• Retail investing and brokerage

  How retail investors trade, why they so often trade against their own interests, and how leverage, trading costs, brokerage practices, and social networks change their outcomes.

• Social media and finance

  How online social networks and social media shape what retail investors believe and how they trade.

• Consumer credit and debt

  How households get, use, and repay credit, and how early-life conditions, cash windfalls, regulation, and politics shape credit access and credit outcomes.

• Local banking and access to finance

  How access to local banks and credit markets shapes the financial lives of households and small businesses over the long run.

• Mortgage lending and housing

  Who gets mortgage credit and on what terms, how lender incentives shape approval decisions, and how institutional investors affect local housing markets.

• Consumer protection and financial regulation

  How regulation, supervision, and politics affect people who use financial services.

• Saving, retirement, and inheritance

  How people accumulate, spend down, and pass on wealth over the life cycle.

• Behavioral finance and beliefs

  Why people’s financial choices depart from what standard economic models predict.

• Legal and regulatory institutions

  How courts, regulators, and politics shape credit markets and what consumers get from them.

Published papers

1. Dynamic Inconsistency in Risky Choice: Evidence from the Lab and Field

   With Zwetelina Iliewa, Alex Imas, and Martin Weber

   American Economic Review

   Risk-taking is dynamically inconsistent: people plan to keep taking risk after gains and stop after losses, but instead cash out gains early and chase losses, in experiments and brokerage data.

2. Shale Shocked: Cash Windfalls and Household Debt Repayment

   With J. Anthony Cookson and Erik P. Gilje

   Journal of Financial Economics

   Households use cash windfalls mainly to pay down debt, timed to when cash arrives rather than to news of future income, which challenges forward-looking models of household debt; evidence from shale drilling payments.

3. Biased by Choice: How Financial Constraints Can Reduce Financial Mistakes

   With Alex Imas

   Review of Financial Studies

   Constraints can reduce financial mistakes: leverage limits improved traders’ performance by curbing the disposition effect, in retail trading data and in two experiments.

4. Personal Wealth, Self-Employment, and Business Ownership

   With Aymeric Bellon, J. Anthony Cookson, and Erik P. Gilje

   Review of Financial Studies

   More personal wealth raises business formation but not transitions to self-employment, suggesting liquidity constraints matter differently for different kinds of entrepreneurs; evidence from shale mineral payments.

5. Politicizing Consumer Credit

   With Pat Akey and Stefan Lewellen

   Journal of Financial Economics

   Expected political influence weakens regulation: when a state’s senator becomes a powerful committee chair, banks headquartered in the state cut lending in the neighborhoods that community lending rules target.

6. YOLO: Mortality Beliefs and Household Finance Puzzles

   With Kristian Ove R. Myrseth and Raphael S. Schoenle

   Journal of Finance

   Subjective survival beliefs work like age-varying time discounting in the life-cycle model, helping explain why the young under-save and retirees draw down their assets slowly.

7. Should Retail Investors’ Leverage Be Limited?

   With Alp Simsek

   Journal of Financial Economics

   Limiting retail investors’ access to leverage cut high-leverage traders’ losses by 40% without reducing market liquidity, based on the 2010 U.S. leverage cap in the retail forex market.

8. Growing Up Without Finance

   With James R. Brown and J. Anthony Cookson

   Journal of Financial Economics

   People who grow up with less access to local banks enter credit markets later and, as adults, have lower credit scores and more delinquent accounts.

9. Law and Finance Matter: Lessons from Externally Imposed Courts

   With James R. Brown and J. Anthony Cookson

   Review of Financial Studies

   More predictable contract enforcement produces stronger local credit markets for small businesses and households, and higher incomes.

10. Peer Pressure: Social Interaction and the Disposition Effect

    Review of Financial Studies

    Social interaction amplifies investors’ biases: joining an investor social network nearly doubles a trader’s disposition effect, the tendency to sell winners and hold losers.

11. Financial Decision Making, at the Dawn of AI

    Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance, forthcoming

    Reviews why people’s saving, investing, and borrowing choices depart from what financial economics prescribes, and how generative AI might change them.

12. Subjective Beliefs, Saving, and Spending for Retirement

    Chapter in Retirement Saving, Investment, and Spending: New Lessons from Behavioral Research

    Reviews how beliefs about the future, especially about one’s own survival, change the predictions of standard models of retirement saving and spending.

13. Courting Economic Development

    With James R. Brown and J. Anthony Cookson

    World Bank Economic Review

    Uncertain court enforcement holds back long-run development: similar reservations under state courts grew faster than those under tribal courts.

14. Friends Do Let Friends Buy Stocks Actively

    Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

    Sociable people are more likely to invest actively than passively, consistent with word of mouth spreading active strategies; evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.

15. Facebook Finance: How Social Interaction Propagates Active Investing

    With David Simon

    Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Working Paper 15-22

    Investors broadcast their successes and stay quiet about losses, so social networks spread active trading despite its low success rates; evidence from a social trading platform.

Working papers

1. Temporal Focal Points and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from U.S. Mortgage Lending

   With Marco Giacoletti and Edison Yu

   Lender incentives shape who gets approved for mortgages: when month-end quotas push loan officers to approve more loans, a 7-point unexplained gap in approval rates shrinks by at least half.

2. Fallible Firms: The Economics of Consumer Redress

   With Charlotte Haendler

   In CFPB complaint data, whether consumers get money back after complaining about a financial firm depends more on who complains than on which firm is involved.

3. Pushing Boundaries: Political Redistricting and Consumer Credit

   With Pat Akey, Christine Dobridge, and Stefan Lewellen

   Consumers lose access to credit when their congressional districts are irregularly redrawn, especially where later elections become less competitive.

4. Five Facts about Bequest Motives

   With Xiang Li

   Bequest motives are stronger for people with heirs and the very wealthy, follow a U-shape over life, and people overestimate the bequests they will leave.

5. The Wealth Draw-down of the Fabulously Rich: Insights from Private Family Foundations

   With Changhyun Ahn

   Draft available on request

   When the eldest member of a very wealthy family dies, the family foundation roughly doubles in size, but charitable giving lags far behind.

6. Single-Family REITs and Local Housing Markets

   With Marco Giacoletti, Wenli Li, and Edison Yu

   Single-family REITs buy homes in neighborhoods ringing city centers, and their growth shows little evidence of harming local housing markets.

7. Brokerage Commissions and Trading Volume: Lessons from the 20th Century

   With Valeria Fedyk

   Draft available on request

   Higher trading costs can increase trading: under fixed NYSE commission schedules, higher commissions raised volume, consistent with brokers steering investors toward high-commission stocks.

8. Borrowing Young, Paying Later

   With Allison Cole and Igor Livshits

   Draft available on request

   Restricting young adults’ credit access protects them from early defaults but creates adverse selection later: after the Credit CARD Act, credit scores and homeownership rose by age 30 while mortgage delinquency increased.

9. Waiting for Wealth: Inheritances and Household Savings

   With Eirik Eylands Brandsaas and Mateo Velásquez-Giraldo

   Draft available on request

   Life-cycle models that omit inheritances overstate how patient households are; expected inheritances raise consumption and lower saving long before they arrive.

Guides and policy writing

1. Navigating Credit Bureau Data: Field Notes for Researchers

   A practical guide to using credit bureau data in research: what it can measure, its limitations, how to acquire it, and how to merge it with other data.

2. Are People Overconfident about Avoiding COVID-19?

   With Haoyang Liu and Xiaohan Zhang

   Liberty Street Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

   People expect their own exposure to COVID-19 to be well below what they expect for the general public.

3. Intergenerational Homeownership and Mortgage Distress

   With Nicholas Fritsch

   Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

   Parents’ mortgage distress during the 2008 crisis is associated with a lower chance that their children buy a home.

4. Geographic Mobility and Consumer Financial Health: Evidence from Oil Production Boom Towns

   With Timothy Stehulak and Caitlin Treanor

   Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

   Residents who move away from oil boom towns after the bust end up with stronger consumer financial health than those who stay.