To examine how financial education affects financial outcomes, one must evaluate whether and how sample selection may bias inferences regarding program impacts. Our incentivized experiment reveals how such selection influences estimated financial education effects. The more financially literate...

We investigate how information processing frictions contribute to household suboptimal saving and investment behavior. We find that 60% of open accounts in college 529 savings plans are invested suboptimally due to high expenses and tax inefficiency. Such investments yield an expected loss of 9%...

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

We characterize the large number of mortgage offers for which people qualify in the United Kingdom. Very few pick the cheapest option, nonetheless the one selected is not usually noticeably more expensive. A few borrowers make very expensive choices. These are most common when the menu they face...

We build a nationally representative sample of retirement savers in Sweden to study how asymmetric updating of beliefs about climate change affects investment decisions. After the intense heat wave of 2018, respondents in regions dominated by a right-wing, anti-climate party grow less concerned...

Annuities, long-term care insurance and reverse mortgages remain unpopular to manage longevity, medical and housing price risks after retirement. We analyze low demand using a life-cycle model structurally estimated with a unique stated-preference survey experiment of Canadian households. Low...

Many people forgo a higher stream of public pension income by claiming early. We provide both quasi-experimental and survey-experimental evidence that the timing of public pension claiming is relatively inelastic to changes in financial incentives in Canada. Using the survey experiment, we...