Implications of financial market imperfections for wealth and debt accumulation in the household sector

我们的目标是阐明有限的信息和社会互动对家庭部门资产和债务积累的作用。最近的金融危机是一个生动的例子，说明关于金融产品的有限信息和知识，以及通过社会互动产生的乘数效应如何传播次优做法。在第一阶段，我们提出了三个问题。第一项研究的是社会互动对家庭借贷和陷入财务困境倾向的影响。第二项研究侧重于先前对金融工具的熟悉程度在资产和债务参与中的作用。第三个重点是家庭金融行为中的文化倾向，以及接触共同（或外源性协调）机构如何有助于金融实践的协调。在建议的项目扩展中，我们计划承担三篇论文。其中一门课程将关注社会互动如何影响家庭期望，并最终影响抵押贷款债务的金融行为。这将涉及在由外管局中心承担的关于家庭财务的开创性混合数据集中增加一个模块。第二部分将考察与更懂理财的邻居互动对家庭理财行为的影响。我们将利用一项独特的瑞典实地实验，使邻里分配外生，从而不受内生邻里选择这一棘手的计量经济学问题的影响。第三篇论文将关注家庭的股票交易行为，以及交易/机会成本与不注意/信息成本对其影响的程度。它将使用来自一家业务广泛的德国商业银行的独特行政数据，并将揭示对金融市场流动性和稳定性可能很重要的不完善的作用。

Our goal is to shed light on the role of limited information and social interactions for asset and debt accumulation in the household sector. The recent financial crisis is a vivid example of how limited information and knowledge about financial products, and multiplicative effects through social interactions can spread suboptimal practices. In the first phase, we pursued three questions. The first studied the effect of social interactions on the tendency of households to borrow and run into financial distress. The second focused on the role of previous familiarity with a financial instrument in asset and debt participation. The third focused on cultural predispositions in household financial behavior and on how exposure to common (or exogenously harmonized) institutions could contribute to harmonization of financial practices. In the proposed extension to the project, we plan to undertake three papers. One will focus on how social interactions can shape household expectations and ultimately financial behavior with emphasis on mortgage debt. This will involve addition of a module to a pioneering Hybrid Data Set on household finances undertaken by the Center SAFE. The second will examine the effects on household financial behavior of interacting with more financially literate neighbors. We will exploit a unique Swedish field experiment that makes allocation to a neighborhood exogenous and thus not subject to the thorny econometric problem of endogenous neighborhood selection. The third paper will focus on stock trading behavior of households and on the extent to which this is influenced by transactions/opportunity costs versus inattention/information costs. It will use unique administrative data from a widely-based German commercial bank and will shed light on the role of imperfections that can be important for the liquidity and stability of financial markets.