Research

From employee to entrepreneur: The role of unemployment risk

with Ai Jun Hou, Sara Jonsson, Xiaoyang Li

Journal of Financial Economics, 2025. 

Key takeaways: Increased unemployment risk, instead of actual unemployment outcome, causally nudges employees into entrepreneurship. This nudge, however, is not associated with poor ex-post personal income or firm quality.

Media coverage: Swedish House of Finance Research in the Spotlight, DN Debatt, and ESBRI.

Effects of cultural origin on entrepreneurship

with Sara Jonsson

Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, 2023. 

Key takeaways: Individuals with stronger cultural risk-taking appetite are more likely to become entrepreneurs, although with poorer firm performance after the transition.

The Fixed Disposition Effect [Job Market Paper]

with Shumiao Ouyang 

Selected presentations: Aalto University, Oxford Saïd, London Junior Finance Workshop 2025, PhD Nordic Finance Workshop 2025, Stockholm Business School, Experimental Finance 2025 

Abstract: We revisit the disposition effect and argue that it is best understood not as a primitive behavioral bias, but as a reduced-form outcome of stable investment styles. Using a unique inter-linked dataset that combines a large-scale experiment with real-world mutual fund transactions, we document strong within-investor persistence in disposition behavior across time and contexts. This persistence is largely driven by a fixed investment style: contrarian investors exhibit a substantially stronger disposition effect, while it is minimal for momentum investors. Investment style explains far more variation in the disposition effect than standard demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. By contrast, realization preference is generally shared. We provide some of the first field evidence that it accounts for roughly 10% of the bias via a sharp jump at the zero-return threshold. Overall, our findings suggest that the disposition effect often emerges as a structural outcome of price-based trading rules, rather than a generic behavioral bias.

Yield Salience: Consumer Demand for Digital Money

with Shumiao Ouyang and Cameron Peng 

[Draft coming soon!]

Abstract: We study how consumers respond to interest incentives in digital payment environments by exploiting quasi-random variation in money market fund yields on Alipay’s Yu’ebao platform. Linking over a million user-month observations to user-specific yields, we estimate the elasticity of digital money demand at both extensive and intensive margins. A one-percentage-point increase in yield raises the probability of adoption by 5.6 pp and balances by 27%, largely through net inflows rather than internal reshuffling. Interestingly, we find no detectable response when yields are below 2%, suggesting a salience threshold in consumers’ attention to interest rates. This behavioral nonlinearity implies that interest-bearing digital payment instruments may have limited traction in low-rate environments—a key consideration for central banks contemplating interest-bearing CBDCs. More broadly, our findings highlight how interest incentives shape household financial behavior in digital ecosystems.

In and down: The Costs of Immigrant Investors

Selected presentations: Luxembourg Household Finance Workshop 2025, PhD Nordic Finance Workshop 2024, BFWG 2024, RBFC 2024

Abstract: This paper examines the portfolio diversification gap between immigrant and native-born investors using a comprehensive administrative dataset from Sweden. Leveraging a carefully matched investor sample, I document that immigrant investors incur a 37% higher return loss compared to natives, driven predominantly by underdiversification instead of high risky share. This gap persists even among second-generation immigrants, suggesting intergenerational disparities in wealth accumulation. I identify two key drivers: social integration and financial literacy. Immigrants with native-born partners or from countries with higher financial literacy levels experience lower return losses. However, merely extending the duration of stay in Sweden does not mitigate the gap. These findings highlight the need for policies that facilitate social integration and promote financial education to improve immigrants’ financial outcomes.

Experiment Participation and Investor Behavior 

with Shumiao Ouyang

Global Survey on Household Preferences and Beliefs

with Elias Rantapuska et al.