Finanzielle Resilienz und der Umgang mit finanziellen Risiken sind wesentliche Bestandteile einer erfolgreichen finanziellen Inklusion. Die persönlichen Faktoren, die finanzielles Management formen, sind allerdings nicht umfassend bekannt. Diese Dissertation untersucht wie nicht-standard-ökonomische Präferenzen und Vorstellungen („Beliefs“) dazu beitragen können verschiedene Vorgehensweisen im finanziellen Risikomanagement von Haushalten zu verstehen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf Ländern, die kurz davor stehen einkommensstarke Ökonomien zu werden und in denen die Auswahl an finanziellen Produkten und die finanzielle Inklusion stetig wachsen. Vier Bereiche des finanziellen Risikomanagements werden betrachtet. Kapitel zwei analysiert den Zusammenhang zwischen Ungleichheitsaversion und der Aufnahme von Versicherungen. Dazu wird ein neuartiges Maß für Ungleichheitsaversion konstruiert und in einer Haushalts-Panelumfrage in Thailand verwendet. In Kapitel drei wird der Effekt von sozialen Vergleichen auf die Schuldenaufnahme in einem Laborexperiment in Deutschland untersucht um zwei Arten von Peer Effekten zu entflechten: Sorge um das soziale Ansehen und Peer Information. Kapitel vier erforscht potenzielle Unterschiede in Unsicherheitspräferenzen und in Beliefs zwischen Individuen, die vermeintlich ein hohes Risiko managen: Selbständige aus der Notwendigkeit und Selbstständige aus der Möglichkeit heraus als auch Menschen mit Migrationsgeschichte in Albanien und im Kosovo. In Kapitel fünf werden Beliefs und deren potenzieller Effekt auf Überschuldung innerhalb der gleichen Panel-Stichprobe in Thailand wie in Kapitel zwei studiert. Alle Kapitel folgen einem gemeinsamen methodologischen Ansatz indem Labor- oder sogenannte lab-in-the-field-Experimente verwendet werden. In drei Kapiteln wird die Evidenz aus dem Labor in Relation zu Resultaten aus dem wahren Leben gesetzt, die mit selbstberichteten Umfragedaten erfasst werden. / Financial resilience and managing financial risks are key factors of a successful financial inclusion. The personal factors that shape financial management are, yet, not well understood. This dissertation studies how non-standard economic preferences and beliefs might help explain different financial management practices of households. The focus is on countries that are on the verge of becoming high income economies and where financial products and inclusion are steadily expanding. Four domains of financial risk management are considered. Chapter two analyzes the relationship between inequality aversion and insurance take-up. To this end, a novel measure for inequality aversion is constructed and employed in a household panel survey in Thailand. In chapter three, the effect of social comparison on debt taking is investigated in a lab experiment in Germany to disentangle two kinds of peer effects: social image concerns and peer information. Chapter four explores potential differences in uncertainty preferences and in beliefs between supposedly high-risk managers: necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs as well as return migrants in Albania and Kosovo. In chapter five, beliefs and their potential effect on over-indebtedness are studied using the same panel sample in Thailand as in chapter two. All chapters follow a common methodological approach by using lab(-in-the-field) experiments. In three chapters, lab evidence is set in relation to real life outcomes elicited with self-reported survey data.

We examine the existence of dividend clienteles in Sweden using a unique dataset containing yearly information on age, gender, income and portfolio composition of about 200 000 Swedish stockholders. The data covers the years between 2005 and 2010. More specifically, we investigate whether investor preferences for dividends differ depending on their age or income. Furthermore, we seek to establish if there are any differences in performance, based on abnormal return, between investors with different dividend yields. We find that age clienteles exist in Sweden; older investors hold stocks with higher dividend yields and invest a larger portion of their portfolio in dividend paying stocks than younger investors. We do not find support for the existence of income clienteles; low-income investors tend to invest in stocks with a higher dividend yield than high-income investors. However, we find that different income groups hold about the same portfolio weight in dividend paying stocks. Overall, we find no significant differences in performance within or between various age or income groups. The main finding of this paper is the identification of age clienteles in Sweden.

This paper argues that the cumulative causation processes between wealth and power risk leading to an escalation of wealth inequality. We confirm with new survey data for the Eurozone Piketty's conclusions that wealth is highly concentrated and that this inequality is perpetuated through dynastic wealth. This leads to an ever-concentrating ability to shape economic and political institutions. While neoclassical economics has a blind spot where power is concerned, we discuss how heterodox approaches have attempted to conceptualize this structural power which influences the framework of economic activity. Finally, we discuss three concrete channels through which the unequal distribution of private assets may affect power relations and economic activity.

This dissertation investigates some of the factors affecting modern household finance decisions in the United States using natural experimental variation and administrative data. In Chapter 1 I estimate the effects of financial education on retirement savings decisions. Between 2007 and 2008 the U.S. Army implemented a mandatory 8 hour Personal Financial Management Course (PFMC) for new soldiers. Staggered implementation across locations and time provides quasi-experimental variation in whether an individual received the training. I find that the course has large and lasting effects on individual retirement savings in the Thrift Savings Plan, a tax-deferred account similar to a 401(k). The course doubles savings, has significant effects throughout the distribution of savings and the effects persist out to two years. The mechanism for the effects is likely a combination of both human capital and behavioral assistance. In Chapter 2 I estimate the effects of financial education on a variety of other economic behaviors. I rely on the same natural experiment as in Chapter 1 but I use individually matched credit data to estimate the effects of financial education on credit scores, credit balances for several types of accounts, monthly payments and adverse legal actions. In some areas I find that the PFMC has beneficial effects, reducing cumulative account balances (especially for automobile accounts) and aggregate monthly payments. In other areas, including credit scores, the probability of being active in the credit market and the number of adverse legal actions, the PFMC has no statistically significant effects on financial behavior. In Chapter 3 I estimate the effects of stress on financial decision-making. I use the natural variation in the casualty rates faced by individuals deploying overseas an exogenous source of stress and I measure the effects of this stress on individuals' participation in the Savings Deposit Program (SDP), a risk-free 10% annual percentage rate savings account. I find a modest and statistically significant negative relationship between the stress of casualties and SDP participation on the order of 5%. Some failures of the randomization test and the confounding effects of overall activity levels and rural locations cannot be eliminated as a source of the observed savings differences and as a result, these results should be considered suggestive evidence of the adverse effects of stress on financial decision-making.

Chapter one shows that US households with high unconditional and cyclical labor income risk are more leveraged and allocate a greater share of their financial assets to stocks. I use self-reported risk preferences to show that rational sorting of risk tolerant workers into risky employment is responsible for this otherwise puzzling result. With risk preferences accounted for, I find evidence that households with greater permanent income variance reduce leverage and stock allocations to an extent consistent with theory. However, household portfolios and employment selection do not respond significantly to any of the other three forms of labor income risk I measure: disaster risk, permanent income cyclicality, and permanent income variance cyclicality. Chapter two reports evidence that individual investors in Indian equities hold better performing portfolios as they become more experienced in the equity market. Experienced investors tilt their portfolios profitably towards value stocks and stocks with low turnover, but these tilts do not fully explain their performance. Experienced investors also tend to have lower turnover and disposition bias. These behaviors, as well as underdiversification, diminish when investors experience poor returns resulting from them, consistent with models of reinforcement learning. Furthermore, Indian stocks held by experienced, well diversified, low-turnover and low-disposition-bias investors deliver higher average returns even controlling for a standard set of stock-level characteristics. Chapter three shows that news reflected by industry stock returns is only gradually incorporated into stock prices in other countries. Information links between cross-border portfolios play a significant role in explaining variation in the speed of this incorporation; responses to industry news are rapid across borders where portfolios share more crosslistings, equity analyst coverage, and a greater common equity investor base. The drift in returns following cross-border industry news has halved in the past 25 years. About half of this change relates to a growth in information links and reductions in expropriations risks facing foreign investors. A simple long-short trading strategy designed to exploit gradual diffusion of industry news across borders appears profitable, but is unlikely to yield returns as high as the 8 to 9 percent annual rate the strategy has returned historically. / Economics

This doctoral thesis consists of 4 self-contained chapters, bound together by their focus on household behavior and social interaction: Bargaining over Risk: The Impact of Decision Power on Household Portfolios. This paper provides an analysis of the internal financial decision-making process of households, employing a unique panel of household finances of the entire Swedish population. Exploitation of a source of exogenous variation in sex-specific labor demand reveals that the distribution of decision power among spouses is a driving force behind the aggregation of spouses’ preferences on financial decision making. Peer Effects and Academic Achievement: Regression Discontinuity Approach. The estimation of peer effects in schools has received much attention in recent years but convincing estimates are hard to produce due to self-selection. This paper overcomes this problem by employing a regression discontinuity design where student assignment into high-ability classes constitutes the source of identifying information. Domestic Equality and Marital Stability: Does More Equal Sharing of Childcare affect Divorce Risk? There is an unanimity that divorce wreaks havoc upon families in which it occurs and individuals growing up in a one-parent family are more likely to deal with term economic and social difficulties. Identifying means by which divorces can be reduced is therefore an important task from a public policy perspective and this paper investigates whether more equal sharing of childcare is successful in doing so. Do Classroom Peers Matter in an Early Tracking System? The potential for peers to affect educational achievement of students is central to many important policy debates, for instance on the impacts of ability tracking. Whether tracking affects efficiency and equality of opportunities depends on how peers enter the educational production function and this paper provides estimates of this. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2014. Sammanfattning jämte 4 uppsatser</p>

Standard finance theory portrays investors as rational utility maximisers. Persisting market anomalies and observed investor practice, however, have led to widespread recognition that the fundamental axioms of rationality are often violated. In response to the limitations inherent in standard theory, the Behavioural Finance approach relaxes the rationality assumption and takes account of psychological influences on individuals’ decision-making processes. Adopting the behavioural approach, this thesis, which includes two empirical studies, examines why, and to what extent, investors depart from rational or optimal investment practices. The thesis examines the effect of Myopic Loss Aversion (MLA) suggested by Benartzi and Thaler (1995) as a response to the Equity Premium Puzzle highlighted by Mehra and Prescott (1985). While previous studies are almost exclusively based on experiments in a laboratory setting, this approach provides more compelling empirical evidence by investigating the effects of MLA on real individual investors’ portfolio allocations through the use of the Dutch National Bank Household Survey. For the first time, the concept of MLA is identified through the interaction of two separate effects, firstly, individuals’ myopia, reflected in portfolio evaluation and rebalancing frequencies, and secondly, loss aversion. The thesis finds that individuals who are less affected by MLA invest more in risky financial assets. Further, individuals who are less myopic increase their share of risky assets invested in their financial portfolios over time, although this is unrelated to their loss aversion. These findings support the prediction of MLA theory that short investment horizons and high loss aversion lead to a significantly lower share of risky investments. In summary, the high equity premium can be explained by the notion of MLA. If individuals evaluate their investment performance over the long-term, they perceive much smaller risks relative to stockholding returns; consequently, they will be prepared to accept smaller equity premiums. The findings suggest possible interventions by policy makers and investment advisors to encourage individuals to remain in the stock market, such as providing long-term investment instruments, or restricting evaluation frequency to the annual reporting of investment performance. In response to the stockholding puzzle (Haliassos and Bertaut, 1995), this thesis also investigates individuals’ stock market returns expectations and their varying levels of risk aversion. Previous studies find that individuals’ heterogeneous stock market expectations determine variations in their stockholdings. The thesis accounts for the effect of risk aversion on stock market expectations, as well as on stockholding decisions. Additionally, the causality issue as between individuals’ expectations and stockholding status is controlled. The thesis finds that more risk averse individuals hold lower stock market expectations, and that the stock market return expectations of more risk averse individuals affect their stock market participation decisions negatively. The portfolio allocation decisions of individuals who already hold stocks are only affected by their expectations, with risk aversion being no longer significant. The thesis argues that persistent risk aversion effects cause individuals to hold pessimistic views of stock market returns, thus contributing to the enduring stockholding puzzle. The thesis reinforces existing perceptions that individuals in the real world may not make fully rational decisions due to their judgments which are based on heuristics and affected by cognitive biases. Individual investors often fail to maximise their utility given their preferences and constraints. Consequently, this thesis draws attention to the possible role of institutions, policy makers, and financial advisory bodies in providing effective interventions and guidelines to improve individuals’ financial decisions.

La complexité grandissante des produits financiers proposés aux ménages et les innovations financières récentes ont révélé la vulnérabilité et la difficulté des ménages `à prendre des décisions appropriées. Afin de mieux comprendre leur comportement, cette thèse se concentre sur les choix de portefeuille des ménages au cours de leur cycle de vie. Quatre chapitres ont ´été d´développés dans ce but. Les conseillers en patrimoine suggèrent aux ménages de de s’investir en actifs risqués à l’approche de la retraite. Le chapitre 1 apporte un éclairage sur cette recommandation. Nous montrons que le profil d’investissement fondé sur cette recommandation n’est pas préférable à un profil d’investissement constant en raison de la sensibilité de leur performance aux marchés et période d’investissement. Cela nous a amené à analyser la relation entre les choix financiers et l’inertie de portefeuille dans le chapitre 2. Il ressort que la part d’actifs risqués est sensible à la conjoncture boursière mais essentiellement à la date d’ouverture du contrat. Les ménages maintiennent le plus souvent leur décision d’investissement tout au long de la durée du contrat. En revanche, en cas de fortes variations boursières, ils réajustent leurs portefeuilles. Ils sont plus sensibles aux baisses qu’aux hausses boursières. L’inertie de portefeuille est influencée par l’ˆâge de l’´épargnant et la date d’ouverture du contrat. Nous approfondissons le résultat de l’effet de l’âge sur l’inertie. Le chapitre 3 étudie donc comment varie la part d’actifs risqués avec l’âge. Nous montrons que cette part décline de façon régulière. Enfin le chapitre 4 analyse la participation des ménages au marché financier ainsi que les incidences de l’environnement économique sur les choix de portefeuille. Nous montrons que les facteurs institutionnels encouragent l’investissement dans l’immobilier au détriment des actifs risqués. Les choix de portefeuille des ménages sont aussi influencés par des facteurs d´démographiques et sociaux. / The increasing complexity of financial products offered to households and the recent financial inno-vations have revealed households’ vulnerability and their difficulty in making appropriate decisions. Tounderstand their behaviour, this thesis deals with household portfolio choice over their life cycle. It consistsof four chapters. Professional financial planners often advise savers that the fraction of wealth held in riskyassets should decline with age or the distance to retirement. Chapter 1 sheds light on this recommendation.We show that the investment profile based on this recommendation is not preferable to an investment profilewhose share invested in risky assets remains constant over time, due to the sensitivity of their performance tomarket and investment length. This led us to analyse the relationship between financial decisions and portfolioinertia in Chapter 2. It appears that the risky share is sensitive to market conditions, but mainly at the dateof subscription. Once the initial share has been selected, inertia of portfolio choice is observed as investorsrarely revise their position subsequently. However, in case of large swings in financial markets, portfolio inertiafalls, and even more so when market go down. The propensity to inertia is influenced by savers’ age, the time,and the subscription date of the contract. Chapter 3 examines how household risky share vary with age. Weshow that the share of capital invested in unit-linked funds chosen by the investor declines steadily. Chapter 4analyses household participation in financial markets and the impact of the economic environment on portfoliochoice. We show that institutional factors encourage investment in real estate at the expense of risky assets.In addition to their economic environment, household portfolio choices are influenced by demographic andsocial factors.

[pt] Entre 2006 e 2010, os preços de imóveis nos EUA caíram cerca de 30 por cento, fazendo com que o principal de um grande número de contratos de hipoteca ficasse abaixo do valor do imóvel. A teoria de default estratégico prediz que devedores nessa situação - chamada de negative equity value - deveriam entregar o imóvel e abandonar o contrato. Entretanto, a taxa de default em hipotecas com negative equity value, além de ser surpreendentemente baixa. Esta dissertação explica a baixa taxa de default no mercado americano de hipotecas a partir de preocupações dos credores em conseguir crédito imobiliário no futuro. O modelo mostra que tal preocupação é mais grave para devedores de baixa renda que se beneficiaram do crédito facilitado advindo da explosão de preços dos imóveis, mas que estão cientes de que tais facilidades provavelmente não estarão presentes no futuro. Os credores de baixa renda, portanto, têm mais incentivos a evitar default em hipotecas de negative equity value do que credores de mais alta renda, que antecipam facilidades em obter novo crédito imobiliário. Utilizando um painel de estados dos EUA para testar a existência deste efeito, mostramos que a inadimplência é mais sensível à queda no preço dos imóveis em áreas com maior renda per capita. / [en] Between 2006 and 2010, the price of houses in the United States fell by 30 percent, implying that a large number of mortgage contracts had negative equity value, that is, a debt outstanding higher than the house value. In these mortgage contracts, it pays for the borrowers to exchange their homes for the write-off of the debt. And yet, the delinquency rate among negative equity mortgages is surprisingly low. This paper argues that the fear of losing access to the credit markets explains why the delinquency rate remained relatively low in the U.S. after the Subprime crises. Our model shows that, with the end of the bubble in the housing market, low-income families are unlikely to qualify for the mortgage contracts they hold. Hence, fear of losing access to credit market lowers their incentive to walk away from their current mortgage contracts, even if they have negative equity value. Using a panel of US states to test the existence of this effect, we show that delinquency is more sensible to a decrease of house prices in areas with higher per capita income.

Cette thèse est constituée de quatre articles. Le premier article avec Johan Hombert montre que lorsque les relations bancaires sont affectées, cela réduit le nombre d'entreprises innovantes et conduit également à une hausse de la mobilité géographique des inventeurs, qui quittent les états où les relations bancaires sont dégradées. Le second article est un travail avec Claire Célerier mettant en avant le rôle de l'offre dans le phénomène de non bancarisation des populations pauvres aux Etats-Unis. Le troisième article étudie les externalités d'innovation et montre que lorsque certaines entreprises innovent moins les autres entreprises locales innovent moins en réponse. Cet effet décroit rapidement avec la distance. Le quatrième article, en collaboration avec Olivier Dessaint, montre que les managers répondent systématiquement à des chocs de liquidité proches d'eux en augmentant temporairement leur trésorier. / This dissertation is made of four distinct chapters. The first chapter with Johan Hombert shows that when lending relationships are hurt, it reduces the number of innovative firms and foster inventor mobility who move out of geographical areas where lending relationships are hurt. The second chapter presents a work with Claire Célerier and shows that supply-side factors account for a large part of the unbanked household phenomenon in the US. The third chapter studies spillovers of innovation and shows that when some firms innovate less other firms in the same city innovate less in response and this effect declines sharply with distance. The fourth chapter with Olivier Dessaint presents evidence that managers systematically respond to near-miss liquidity shocks by temporarily increasing the amount of corporate cash holdings.