We study how investors respond to inflation combining a customized survey experiment with trading data at a time of historically high inflation. Investors’ beliefs about the stock return–inflation relation are very heterogeneous in the cross section and on average too optimistic. Moreover, many investors appear unaware of inflation-hedging strategies despite being otherwise well-informed about prevailing inflation rates and asset returns. Consequently, whereas exogenous shifts in inflation expectations do not impact return expectations, information on past returns during periods of high inflation leads to negative updating about the perceived stock-return impact of inflation, which feeds into return expectations and subsequent actual trading behavior.

Abstract We educate investors about the benefits of dividend reinvestment and costs of misperceiving dividends as free income. The intervention increases planned dividend reinvestment in survey responses. Using trading records, we observe a causal increase in dividend reinvestment in the field of roughly 50 cents for every euro received. This holds relative to investors’ prior behavior and various control samples. Investors who learned the most from the intervention update their trading the most. 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.

Based on data gathered from 27,000 real-world meetings between financial advisors and clients of a large German bank, we show that advisors offer more self-serving advice to women, while men are more likely to receive sales fee rebates and less likely to be recommended expensive in-house multi-asset (IHMA) funds. Additional client and advisor surveys provide evidence consistent with statistical discrimination based on gender as a proxy for client financial sophistication, with female clients exhibiting lower financial literacy, confidence, and price sensitivity. Moreover, female advisors report less confidence in their own professional skills and engage in less discrimination than male colleagues. (JEL D83, G21, G51, G53, J16, L84)