Rawley Z. Heimer

This working paper has been removed.

We identify the effect of local financial markets using congressional legislation that led to large and unintended differences in financial market development across Native American reservations. Individuals who grow up on financially underdeveloped reservations enter formal credit markets later than individuals from financially developed reservations and have persistently worse consumer credit outcomes.

Social interaction contributes to some traders' disposition effect. New data from an investment-specific social network linked to individual-level trading records builds evidence of this connection.

Can leverage constraints mitigate overconfident financial decision-making? I examine CFTC regulation capping the maximum permissible leverage available to U.S. households that trade foreign exchange on the same brokerages as similar but unregulated European traders. The constraint reduces trading volume and alleviates up to three-quarters of per-trade losses.

This paper shows how active investing strategies propagate through social connections in a network of retail traders, using a new database of social activity linked to individual-level trading records.

Subjective mortality beliefs affect pre- and post-retirement consumption and savings decisions, as well as portfolio allocation. New survey evidence shows that individuals overestimate their mortality at short horizons and survival rate at long horizons.

This paper provides causal evidence that leverage constraints can reduce the underperformance of individual investors.

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal connections between legal institutions, credit markets, and real economic activity.

This research is the first to provide empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent amongst active rather than passive investors.

Rates of US homeownership have declined in the past two decades, and the decline has been especially pronounced for young adults. Motivated by recent research that explores the ways in which personal experiences can affect financial attitudes and beliefs, we explore whether the negative homeownership experiences of parents during the 2008 financial crisis could have caused their children to view homeownership less favorably. We find that parental mortgage distress negatively correlates with the probability that a child will purchase a home, and we explore various channels through which this link may occur.

One way a household might handle financial distress is to relocate to another area that offers greater income opportunities. This article examines the impact of geographic mobility on consumer finances by focusing on the residents of "boom towns" - areas that saw a surge of growth in oil-drilling activity around 2010 and a bust thereafter. We find that residents who move after the bust experience stronger consumer financial health than residents who stay put.