Three Essays on Financial Decision-Making

From its beginnings, behavioral economics has been concerned with how people make systematic and costly deviations from financially optimal decisions. In this dissertation I present three articles contributing to that tradition. In chapter one, co-authored with Samuel M. Hartzmark and Alex Imas, I examine how owning an asset biases peoples' learning in response to new information. In chapter two, I examine how biased beliefs interact with preferences to produce one of the most well-studied behavioral anomalies in finance, the disposition effect. In chapter three, coauthored with Abigail B. Sussman, I examine the effects of a ubiquitous choice architecture in credit card debt repayment, minimum required payments.