D - Microeconomics
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Flight from Safety: How a Change to the Deposit Insurance Limit Affects Households’ Portfolio Allocation
Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper. -
The Formation of House Price Expectations in Canada: Evidence from a Randomized Information Experiment
We conduct a randomized information experiment leveraging the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations. We provide causal evidence that respondents revise both their short- and medium-term expectations of future house price growth in a way that is consistent with observed short-term momentum in house prices. However, empirically, house price growth tends to revert to its mean in the medium term. -
Are Long-Horizon Expectations (De-)Stabilizing? Theory and Experiments
Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.