What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

There is little evidence on how the large market for credit score improvement products affects consumers or credit market efficiency. A randomized encouragement design on a standard credit builder loan (CBL) identifies null average effects on whether consumers have a credit score and the score...

We examine how 17 behavioral biases relate to each other, to other decision inputs, and to decision outputs. Most consumers exhibit multiple biases in our nationally representative panel data. There is substantial heterogeneity across consumers, even within similar demographic/skill groups....

We develop and test a simple model of limited attention in intertemporal choice. The model posits that individuals fully attend to consumption in all periods but fail to attend to some future lumpy expenditure opportunities. This asymmetry generates some predictions that overlap with models of...

We 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 survey...

Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and...