Borrower misreporting is associated with seriously adverse loan outcomes. Significantly more residential mortgage borrowers reported personal assets just above round number thresholds than just below. Borrowers who reported above‐threshold assets were almost 25 percentage points more likely to become delinquent (mean delinquency was 20%). For applicants with unverified assets, the increase in delinquency was greater than 40 percentage points. Misreporting was most frequent in areas with low financial literacy or social capital. Incorporating behavioral cues such as threshold effects into a risk assessment model improves its ability to uncover delinquencies, though at a cost of mischaracterizing some safe loans.

We analyze the reliability of voluntary disclosures of financial information, focusing on widely‐employed publicly‐available hedge fund databases. Tracking changes to statements of historical performance recorded between 2007 and 2011, we find that historical returns are routinely revised. These revisions are not merely random or corrections of earlier mistakes; they are partly forecastable by fund characteristics. Funds that revise their performance histories significantly and predictably underperform those that have never revised, suggesting that unreliable disclosures constitute a valuable source of information for investors. These results speak to current debates about mandatory disclosures by financial institutions to market regulators.

Using a field experiment in a 401(k) plan, we measure the effect of disseminating information about peer behavior on savings. Low‐saving employees received simplified plan enrollment or contribution increase forms. A randomized subset of forms stated the fraction of age‐matched coworkers participating in the plan or age‐matched participants contributing at least 6% of pay to the plan. We document an oppositional reaction: the presence of peer information decreased the savings of nonparticipants who were ineligible for 401(k) automatic enrollment, and higher observed peer savings rates also decreased savings. Discouragement from upward social comparisons seems to drive this reaction.