One advisor for the whole world? Cross-country evidence on financial advice from large language models

Claes Bäckman

No 490, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: Households around the world increasingly take portfolio advice from the same handful of large language models. Does that advice adjust to what local circumstances warrant? I pose the same portfolio problem to leading models across twenty-one countries, each in its own language. Advice is nearly uniform across countries, even though the explanations invoke local context. What moves the advice instead is the model a household consults, not the country it lives in. The models follow retail financial advice rather than what academic finance would prescribe, and fail to incorporate the household's balance sheet even when it is stated. While automated advice once held out the promise of tailoring guidance to everyone, large language models encode the same advice for everyone.

Keywords: large language models; financial advice; household finance; portfolio choice; robo-advising; cross-country variation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 G11 G41 G51 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:safewp:343061

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