1 Financial Decisions: The role of information through social networks

When forming expectations and making financial decisions, do economic agents use their social interactions to augment their information sets and learn from them? The answer to this is important for assessing whether social networks mainly reduce information costs or spread aspects of financial culture through imitation and comparison. In this project, we hypothesize and test whether and to what extent social networks are used for disseminating information relevant for expectations formation and financial decision-making. This is done by exploiting a unique survey-based longitudinal dataset in France (Taylor Nelson-Sofres ‘Mode de vie des Français ’ survey). At the moment there are no outputs yet. Due to a variety of administrative and funding hurdles, we were unable to field the survey questionnaire in December 2014 as originally expected. In early April we have finally got confirmation that we will able to run the survey in mid May 2015. The questionnaire is now complete and we expect to start getting some results from the survey in July 2015