Essays on Behavioral Finance and Corporate Governance

Abstract

This doctoral thesis consists of five papers, of which four deal with experiments in household finance to investigate deviations from rational choice, one deals with diversity in corporate boards. The first four papers in this thesis evaluate the question, how consumers deal with multiple accounts, mainly credits. The main goal of our studies is to investigate heuristics in deviation from optimal behavior - which we call misallocation - in an experimental setting and shed light on the questions how people can be influenced to reduce misallocation. Furthermore, we generalize our findings on borrowing and investment situations. The last paper focuses on the development of ethnic diversity in boardrooms of French firms in the CAC40 index.