The authors explore dynamics of limited attention in the $35 billion market for checking overdrafts, using survey content as shocks to the salience of overdraft fees. Conditional on selection into surveys, individuals who face overdraft-related questions are less likely to incur a fee in the...

Does borrowing at 400 percent APR do more harm than good? The Pentagon asserts that payday loans harm military readiness and successfully lobbied for a binding 36 percent APR cap on loans to military members and their families (effective October 1, 2007). But existing evidence on how access to...

Many policymakers and some behavioral models hold that restricting access to expensive credit helps consumers by preventing overborrowing. The author examines some short-run effects of restricting access, using household panel survey data on payday loan users collected around the imposition of...

Jonathan Zinman, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a visiting scholar with the Payment Cards Center, makes a casual comparison of industry and household data sets which suggests that households underreport credit card borrowing by a factor of three. This paper offers...