We review an empirical literature that studies the role of social interactions in driving
economic and financial decision-making. We first summarize recent work that documents an …

We study brokerage platform outages to examine the impact of retail investors on financial
markets. We contrast outages at Robinhood, which caters to inexperienced investors, with …

Trading in cryptocurrencies grew rapidly over the last decade, dominated by retail investors.
Using data from eToro, we show that retail traders are contrarian in stocks and gold, yet the …

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure
of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 332 European regions. We …

We analyze a large-scale survey of small business owners, managers, and employees in
the United States to understand the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on those businesses …

Social learning is the updating of beliefs based on observation of others. Such observation
can lead to efficient aggregation of information, but also to inaccurate decisions, fragility of …

Flooding is the most costly natural disaster faced by US households, yet policymakers are
puzzled by the low take-up rates for flood insurance. Leveraging novel transaction-level …

We show that institutional investors are more likely to invest in firms from regions to which
they have stronger social ties but find no evidence that these investments earn a differential …

We offer a new social approach to investment decision making and asset prices. Investors
discuss their strategies and convert others to their strategies with a probability that increases …

In digital finance markets, investors can withdraw their non-binding bids within a cooling-off
period. As the bids are visible online, we argue that this option can be used to manipulate …