Beliefs About the Stock Market and Investment Choices: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Designing Information Provision Experiments

“…Bottan and Perez-Truglia (2020a) study the causal effect of home price expectations on the timing of home sales using a large-scale field experiment featuring administrative data. Laudenbach et al (2021) use an information experiment to study the causal effect of subjective beliefs about stock returns on investment choices measured in administrative account data. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Hanspal et al (2020) provide experimental evidence that beliefs about the duration of the stock market recovery shape households' expectations about their own wealth and their planned investment decisions and labor market activity.…”

“…Presumably, demand effects should be lower in tasks in which real money is at stake. Field outcomes A small number of studies manage to link information provision with natural outcomes from the field, such as the take-up of job offers (Bursztyn et al, 2020b), the repayment of credit card debt (Bursztyn et al, 2019), welfare take-up (Finkelstein and Notowidigdo, 2019), policy choices of politicians (Hjort et al, 2019), campaign donations (Perez-Truglia andCruces, 2017), voting behavior (Cruz et al, 2018;Gerber et al, 2020;Kendall et al, 2015), canvassing activity using an online application (Hager et al, 2020(Hager et al, , 2021, home sales (Bottan and Perez-Truglia, 2020a), credit card spending (Galashin et al, 2020), or stock trading choices of retail investors (Laudenbach et al, 2021). The key advantage of these studies is that they provide unobtrusive behavioral outcome data from a natural setting.…”

Designing Information Provision Experiments

“…Moreover, Perez-Truglia (2020a) study the causal effect of home price expectations on the timing of home sales using a large-scale field experiment featuring administrative data. Laudenbach et al (2021) use an information experiment to study the causal effect of subjective beliefs about stock returns on investment choices measured in administrative account data. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Hanspal et al (2020) provide experimental evidence that beliefs about the duration of the stock market recovery shape households' expectations about their own wealth and their planned investment decisions and labor market activity.…”

“…Presumably, demand effects should be lower in tasks in which real money is at stake. Field outcomes A small number of studies manage to link information provision with natural outcomes from the field, such as the take-up of job offers (Bursztyn et al, 2020b), the repayment of credit card debt (Bursztyn et al, 2019), welfare take-up (Finkelstein and Notowidigdo, 2019), policy choices of politicians (Hjort et al, 2019), campaign donations (Perez-Truglia and Cruces, 2017), voting behavior (Cruz et al, 2018;Gerber et al, 2020;Kendall et al, 2015), canvassing activity using an online application (Hager et al, 2020(Hager et al, , 2021, home sales (Bottan and Perez-Truglia, 2020a), credit card spending (Galashin et al, 2020), or stock trading choices of retail investors (Laudenbach et al, 2021). The key advantage of these studies is that they provide unobtrusive behavioral outcome data from a natural setting.…”