Determinants of individuals' objective and subjective financial fragility during the COVID-19 pandemic

We examine determinants of the objective and subjective financial fragility of 2100 individuals across Australia, France, Germany, and South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective financial fragility reflects individuals’ (in)ability to deal with unexpected expenses, while subjective financial fragility reflects their emotional response to financial demands. Controlling for an extensive set of socio-demographics, we find that negative personal experiences during the pandemic (i.e., reduced or lost employment; COVID-19 infection) are associated with higher objective and subjective financial fragility. However, individuals’ cognitive (i.e., financial literacy) as well as non-cognitive abilities (i.e., internal locus of control; psychological resilience) help to counteract this higher financial fragility. Finally, we examine the role of government financial support (i.e., income support; debt relief) and find that it is negatively related to financial fragility only for the economically weakest households. Our results have implications for public policymakers, providing levers for reducing individuals’ objective and subjective financial fragility

Multiancestry analysis of the HLA locus in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases uncovers a shared adaptive immune response mediated by HLA-DRB1*04 subtypes

Across multiancestry groups, we analyzed Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) associations in over 176,000 individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) versus controls. We demonstrate that the two diseases share the same protective association at the HLA locus. HLA-specific fine-mapping showed that hierarchical protective effects of HLA-DRB1*04 subtypes best accounted for the association, strongest with HLA-DRB1*04:04 and HLA-DRB1*04:07, and intermediary with HLA-DRB1*04:01 and HLA-DRB1*04:03. The same signal was associated with decreased neurofibrillary tangles in postmortem brains and was associated with reduced tau levels in cerebrospinal fluid and to a lower extent with increased Aβ42. Protective HLA-DRB1*04 subtypes strongly bound the aggregation-prone tau PHF6 sequence, however only when acetylated at a lysine (K311), a common posttranslational modification central to tau aggregation. An HLA-DRB1*04-mediated adaptive immune response decreases PD and AD risks, potentially by acting against tau, offering the possibility of therapeutic avenues

Financial disclosure readability and innovative firms' cost of debt

Innovative firms confront potential lenders with various risks, including possible innovation failure, uncertain R&D investment payoffs, cash flow volatility, and low collateral value of hard-to-value intangible assets. As a result, these firms might struggle to obtain financing. More readable financial disclosures could mitigate the informational risk around innovative firms' fundamentals, ease their monitoring by lenders, and thus ultimately reduce these firms' cost of debt. In this regard, we find that while all firms can overcome information uncertainty about their firm fundamentals and reduce their spreads by having more readable financial disclosures, there is an additional benefit in terms of readability further lowering the cost of debt for innovative firms. The additional benefit that innovative firms can achieve from having more readable financial disclosures, however, is limited to situations of more pronounced information asymmetry where there is no previous lending relationship

Focal versus background goals in consumer financial decision-making: Trading off financial returns for self-expression?

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Psychological characteristics and household savings behavior: The importance of accounting for latent heterogeneity

We employ a finite mixture model with maximum likelihood (ML) estimation to analyze latent heterogeneity in the relationship between psychological characteristics and household savings behavior. In a one-step ML estimation approach, we estimate a class membership model and a behavioral model of the classes jointly. Adopting this approach enables us to simultaneously assess how socio-demographic characteristics affect class membership probabilities and estimate class-specific regression coefficients, to test whether psychological characteristics predict savings behavior differently across latent classes. We apply this approach to a representative sample of UK households (n =3382) and identify two different latent classes: striving versus established households. We find that the relationship between psychological characteristics and savings behavior differs across these two classes, demonstrating the importance of accounting for latent heterogeneity when studying the drivers of savings behavior. Our results have implications for policymakers attempting to improve household savings behavior. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved