Conference Agenda

We study the environmental sustainability of individuals’ consumption choices using unique data from a FinTech App that tracks users’ spending and emissions at the transaction level. Using a randomized encouragement design, we show that individuals are likely to purchase carbon calculator services that provide them with detailed transaction-level information about their emissions.

However, such a tool does not cause significant changes in their consumption and emissions. On the other hand, services that offset individuals’ emissions by planting trees are less likely to be adopted but prove effective in reducing users’ net emissions. Conditioning on age, gender, and income does not alter our findings. Our results show the challenges and opportunities associated

with the automated tools promoting sustainable behavior that were initially confined to specialized FinTech Apps and are now becoming widespread across large financial institutions.

We educate investors with significant dividend holdings about the benefits of dividend reinvestment and the costs of misperceiving dividends as additional, free income. The intervention increases planned dividend reinvestment in survey responses. Using trading records, we observe a corresponding causal increase in dividend reinvestment in the field. This holds relative to their prior behavior and a placebo sample. Investors who learned the most from the intervention update their trading by the largest extent. The results suggest the free dividends fallacy is a significant source of dividend demand. Our study demonstrates that simple, targeted, and focused educational interventions can affect investment behavior.

Investors perceive cash in their savings accounts differently from cash recycled in their stock brokerage accounts. We propose a novel “temperature” framework for financial resources, where the former is labeled “cold cash” and the latter “hot cash.” We find that individual investors buy stocks more cautiously with colder cash. Exploiting the quasi-natural experiment of the 2016 Chinese IPO lottery reform, we show that the effect of cash temperature on investors' cautiousness in stock selection is causal. An online experiment, where cash temperature is randomly assigned, indicates that the differential loss aversion is a potential channel for the cash-temperature effect. Building on the observational and experimental findings, we propose a portfolio choice model that features preferences with temperature-dependent sensitivity to future gains and losses. The model generates the empirical patterns documented in this paper and provides a cash-temperature perspective for other puzzles in the literature.