Does the ability to generate verifiable digital financial histories, with customers having data-sharing rights, improve credit access? We answer this using India's launch of an Open-Banking based public digital payment infrastructure (UPI). Using rarely available data on the universe of consumer...

Rising interest rates can create "mortgage rate lock" for homeowners with fixed rate mortgages, who can hold onto their low rates as long as they stay in their homes but would have to take on new mortgages with higher rates if they moved. We show mobility rates fell in 2022 and 2023 for...

Many young employees work on a temporary basis, which entails significantly greater income risk than "permanent" work, even for jobs in the same occupation and at a similar wage. We find that this income uncertainty leads lenders to ration credit to temporary workers, precisely at the stage of...

This paper examines the long-term impact of keeping versus losing one's home following a mortgage delinquency in the aftermath of the Great Recession, studying the trajectory of homeownership, consumption, and financial well-being over the subsequent decade. Our research design leverages the...

We present a dynamic life-cycle model of demand for owner-occupied housing, investment property and liquid assets. Households face transaction costs, downpayment requirements, liquidity constraints, and tax preferences for owner-occupied housing. The model replicates key facts about home...

Older people often express regret about financial decisions made earlier in life that left them susceptible to old-age insecurity. Prior work has explored one outcome, saving regret, or peoples' expressed wish that they had saved more earlier in life. The present paper extends attention to five...

We study how investors respond to inflation combining a customized survey experiment with trading data at a time of historically high inflation. Investors' beliefs about the stock return-inflation relation are very heterogeneous in the cross section and on average too optimistic. Moreover, many...

Under-refinancing limits the transmission of accommodative monetary policy to the household sector and costs mortgage holders in many countries a significant fraction of income annually. We test whether targeted communication can reduce the attention frictions that inhibit transmission by...

We provide a first look into the drivers of household cryptocurrency investing. Analyzing consumer transaction data for millions of U.S. households, we find that, except for high income early adopters, cryptocurrency investors resemble the general population. These investors span all income...

We measure the heterogeneous welfare effects of the recent inflation surge across households in the Euro Area. A simple framework illustrating the numerous channels of the transmission mechanism of surprise inflation to household welfare guides our empirical exercise. By combining micro data and...