Summer Term 2026

May 20, 2026 / 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. /  D4.0.039
Marta Cota (Nova SBE)

Title:"Is Knowledge Enough? Financial Literacy, Marriage, and Gender Differences in Wealth"
(joint with Marta Morazzoni, University College London; Maria Frech, Toulouse School of Economics; Michael Tallent, University College London)

Abstract: This paper studies whether financial literacy shapes gender differences in wealth. Using data from the United States and the Netherlands, we document that women have lower financial literacy and confidence than men, are less likely to manage long-term investments within their households, and hold fewer financial assets, with the largest gaps among married agents. We build a life-cycle portfolio-choice model with endogenous financial literacy accumulation and marital dynamics centered around two wedges: a higher cost of literacy investment for married women and gender-specific perceived returns on risky assets. The calibrated model qualitatively matches untargeted life-cycle patterns in literacy and portfolio choice, ac- counting for a third of the gender gap in individual financial assets. Counterfactual exercises show that early-life financial education can narrow the gender knowledge gap, and portfolio-allocation rules may offset confidence and marriage-related wedges that education may not undo, lowering the wealth gap by 6%.

April 22, 2026 / 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. /  TC.3.05
Tomy Lee (Central European University)

Title: "Public Goods in Crises" 
(joint with Chaojun Wang, University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School)

Abstract: We introduce nonrival public goods into global games of regime change and rationalize investor behavior in the Euro crisis, the collapse of Terra, and the 2023 bank runs. Each investor in a large project is vanishingly unlikely to be pivotal for its survival. She also benefits from the project’s enormous public goods. In equilibrium, this large benefit precisely counterbalances her vanishing pivotal likelihood, such that even an atomistic and selfish investor internalizes her marginal impact on project survival. In an economy of firms, any divestment yields financial gains whenever it positively assorts projects’ public goods with investors’ sensitivities to those goods. Yet such divestments can harm the social surplus.

March 30, 2026  / 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. /  TC.3.05
Lukas Körber (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Title: "Nonlinearities and Pricing Complexity in the Cross-Section of Stock Returns" 
(joint with Fabio Girardi, Vienna University of Economics and Business., and Christian Schlag,  Goethe University Frankfurt)

Abstract: We evaluate the pricing performance of a robust stochastic discount factor spanned by a broad cross-section of factor returns. Methodologically, we combine kernel principal component analysis—which extracts factors as nonlinear functions of a high-dimensional set of firm characteristics—with novel regularization techniques. Allowing for nonlinearities enhances the model’s performance in explaining a wide range of prominent cross-sectional stock-return anomalies and reduces pricing errors. We further decompose the mean–variance efficient portfolio into linear and nonlinear components and study their relative contributions across macro-financial conditions. Out-of-sample, incorporating nonlinearities increases theSharpe ratio of the mean–variance efficient portfolio by roughly 25% to 2.15.

March 04, 2026 / 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. /  TC.3.05
Giuditta Perinelli (MIT Sloan School of Management)

Title: "Corporate Loan Moratorium in Times of Crisis"
(joint with Alberto Grassi, ECB, and Nils Kerwien, VGSF)

Abstract: Suspending loan repayments is a widely used crisis tool designed to provide liquidity to firms without direct fiscal costs to the government. We study the take-up and real effects of the 2020 European corporate debt moratorium, which required banks to temporarily accept postponed repayments. Exploiting a discontinuity in eligibility at a €2 million asset threshold for Austrian firms, we show that access to the moratorium relaxes financing constraints, leading to higher cash holdings, investment, and productivity—without persistent increases in debt and without raising default rates. Despite these benefits, take-up among eligible firms was low. We provide evidence that concerns about stigma from relationship banks may have deterred participation. In particular, we document that banks revise upward the “unlikely-to-pay” classification of firms using the policy, even though actual delinquencies do not increase. We incorporate these findings into a dynamic investment model with endogenous default to evaluate alternative credit-relief policies, such as grants.