Working Papers
Higher Order Beliefs and Risky Asset Holdings
with Yuriy Gorodnichenko, 12/2024
Online Appendix
Combine a customized survey and randomized controlled trial (RCT) to study the effect of higher-order beliefs on U.S. retail investors’ portfolio allocations. Investors’ higher-order beliefs about stock market returns are correlated with but distinct from their first-order beliefs. The differences between the two vary systematically according to investor characteristics. An exogenous increase in first-order beliefs increases the portfolio share allocated to the stock market (risky assets), while an exogenous increase in higher-order beliefs reduces it.
Subjective Income Expectations and Household Debt Choices
with Francesco D'Acunto and Michael Weber, 10/2024
After unexpected positive income shocks, consumers form excessively positive expectations about future income and debt capacity relative to the ex-post realizations. They also raise debt to finance higher current spending. This subsequently increases their likelihoods of default in the medium run. The effects are larger for lower-income consumers and consumers who face more volatile income streams.
Learning in the Limit: Income Inference from Credit Extensions
04/2025
Online Appendix
R&R at Journal of Finance
Credit limit extensions significantly increase consumer expectations about future income growth. After controlling for the changes in consumer income expectations, the spending responses to credit limit extensions decrease by around 30%. The higher income expectations are likely driven by updated beliefs about labor demand instead of labor supply.
Investing in Lending Technology: IT Spending in Banking
with Zhiguo He, Sheila Jiang, and Douglas Xu, 11/2023
R&R at Management Science
Link banks' IT spending in various categories to different lending technologies. Investment in communication IT is associated more with improving banks' ability of soft information production and transmission, while investment in software IT helps enhance banks' hard information processing capacity.
Banks that receive a large amount of firm hard information get better screening ability and make loans with lower default rates, and higher interest rates. This increases the profitability of the banks but has an insignificant impact on total lending volume. The effects are larger for banks with higher IT capacity. Consequently, high IT-capacity banks cream-skim high-quality borrowers from low IT-capacity banks.
Cost Misperception: The Impact of Misunderstanding Credit Card Debt Expenses
with Tianyu Han, 05/2025
Borrowers exhibit inaccurate perceptions of the interest costs of credit card debt. A one percentage point lower perceived interest rate leads to a 5% higher credit card debt relative to the pre-treatment average. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that these effects are likely driven by limited financial literacy.