Using four datasets of individuals’ digital payment and mutual fund investment records from a dominating fintech platform, we observe a robust U-shaped relation between individuals’ consumption and their financial wealth shocks. Contrary to the prediction of the wealth effect, individuals increase their consumption shortly after experiencing large positive and negative wealth shocks. The unexpected increase in consumption following negative wealth shocks is particularly pronounced among consumption categories with a “hedonic” nature, such as entertainment-related items. We show that this effect, termed “financial retail therapy,” is consistent with a dynamic model of Prospect Theory and evidence from a controlled laboratory experiment.

This paper studies the effect of housing wealth shocks on workplace shirking. We use the type and actual time stamps of credit card transactions to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. After positive shocks to house prices, affected homeowners experienced a fast and persistent increase (by 19% per month) in their propensity to use work hours to attend to personal needs. The post-shock response is more pronounced among homeowners with a greater wealth increase, with poorer career potential, or for occupations with higher monitoring costs. Our estimate implies an elasticity of shirking propensity with respect to house price of 3.8.

This paper answers the following question posed by Richard Roll: Should one work less, or perhaps retire early, if her stock portfolio performs well? We show that in a standard life-cycle model the answer to both questions is yes. We solve explicitly for the endogenous retirement time and labor supply. We nd that human capital acts like a portfolio of European put options on stock. The agent's labor choice can be characterized by four regions (categorized according to the nancial wealth of the agent at a given time): retire, vacation, work, and work-forever. We show that for a constant wage when the agent's stock performs well, she will work less and retire earlier. We also nd that poorer people (those whose stock returns are worse) should 1)-invest less of their wealth in stock, and 2)-borrow heavily when their stock does badly. We nd that the conditional volatility of labor income is hump-shaped as a function of the stock price. An agent will invest fewer dollars in the stock market when she has no future labor income.