Personal Financial Advice and Portfolio Quality with Claes Bäckman, Andreas Hackethal, Tobin Hanspal, and Dominique M. Lammer (Review of Finance)
Beyond Connectivity: Stock Market Participation in a Network with Claes Bäckman and Anastasiia Parakhoniak (Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control)
Unshrouding product-specific attributes through financial education with Vimal Balasubramaniam, Aditi Dimri, and Renuka Sane (Journal of Development Economics)
Bank Secrecy in Offshore Centers and Capital Flows: Does Blacklisting Matter? with Andrea D’Angelo and Donato Masciandaro (2017) Review of Financial Economics, 32: 30-57 (paper)
Banking Secrecy and Global Finance: Economic and Political Issues with Donato Masciandaro (2015) Palgrave Macmillan (publisher website)
Peer Effects in Multi-Layer Networks: Evidence from Financial Behavior with Gabriela Stockler (SSRN)
We examine the simultaneous peer effects of co-workers, family, and neighbors in financial behavior using Danish registry data. We find that neighbors exert the strongest influence, followed by co-workers and family members. Peer effects are stronger for stocks than for mutual funds, and among experienced investors. While co-workers primarily influence buying decisions, neighbors affect both buying and selling, suggesting distinct channels of influence across peer groups. A multi-layer network model formalizes our empirical results, showing that an investor’s trading activity depends on her centrality within and across network layers. Our findings provide new insights into the drivers and implications of peer effects in financial markets.
Greener Pensions, Greener Choices? Linking Investments to Sustainable Behavior with Charlotte Christiansen and Malene Kallestrub-Lamb (SSRN)
We study how access to sustainable investment options affects individual consumption behavior. Exploiting a natural experiment in the Danish pension system, where a large pension fund introduced a sustainability-focused pension plan while holding contributions fixed, we examine spillovers from financial to product markets. Using administrative data and a difference-in-differences design, we show that access to the sustainable pension plan increases electric-vehicle adoption and reduces vehicle-related emissions. Strikingly, these effects are driven primarily by individuals who do not adopt the sustainable pension plan. The results suggest that expanding sustainable investment opportunities can reshape real economic behavior beyond portfolio choice, even in the absence of take-up.
When Markets Get Confused: Misperception versus Inventory with Claes Bäckman, Arze Karam, and Anastasiia Parakhoniak (SSRN )
We examine episodes in which investors mistakenly trade similarly named stocks to identify short-term, non-fundamental pricing errors. Using a long time series and a broad crosssection of U.S. equities, we systematically document the frequency, magnitude, and market response to these "confusion events". These incidents generate pronounced abnormal returns and wider effective spreads, consistent with transient mispricing. By exploiting confusion events as exogenous, we provide new causal evidence that such dislocations primarily arise from investor misperception rather than inventory frictions. Importantly, the two channels are not mutually exclusive but represent orthogonal sources of inefficiency-belief-driven demand shocks versus dealer balance-sheet constraints. We demonstrate that, under normal conditions, the misperception channel dominates, whereas under systemic stress, inventory constraints become binding. This duality bridges the behavioral and structural perspectives on market inefficiency, underscoring that belief errors remain a pervasive driver of transient dislocations, even in deep, liquid, and technologically advanced markets.
Social Dimensions of ESG Investment with Charlotte Christiansen and Malene Kallestrub-Lamb
Discrimination and Demand for Financial Advice with Markus Eyting, Judd B. Kessler, Christine Laudenbach, and Bianca Putz