This paper demonstrates that it is possible to construct accurate pictures of firm revenue, growth, geographic dispersion, and customer base characteristics using an increasingly accessible class of consumer financial transaction data. We develop two new measures which characterize firms'...

We develop and estimate a model of consumer search with spatial learning. Consumers make inferences from previously searched objects to unsearched objects that are nearby in attribute space, generating path dependence in search sequences. The estimated model rationalizes patterns in data on...

In recent years, numerous U.S. cities have enacted taxes on sweetened beverages, but there is relatively little evidence about the effects of these taxes on purchases and consumption. In this paper, we examine the effects of the beverage tax of 1.5 cents per ounce that was implemented in...

In this study, we quantify the effects of receiving stocks from certain brands on spending in the brand's stores. We use data from a new FinTech company called Bumped that opens brokerage accounts for its users and rewards them with stocks when they shop at previously elected stores. For...

Consumer choices are increasingly mediated by algorithms, which use data on those past choices to infer consumer preferences and then curate future choice sets. Behavioral economics suggests one reason these algorithms so often fail: choices can systematically deviate from preferences. For...

This paper provides a comprehensive, global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of 2013. We extend our earlier dataset by including recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the use of government guarantees on banks' assets and liabilities, including during the recent...

The appropriateness of many high-cost loan regulations depends on whether demand is driven by financial conditions ("misfortunes") or imperfect decisions ("mistakes"). Bank records from Iceland show borrowers are especially illiquid just before getting a loan, but that some spend the loans...

We asked 97 cigarette smokers to make a series of 12 binary choices between experimental cigarette packages with varying warnings and background colors. Each smoker had to decide which of the two packages contained cigarettes less risky for his health. We tested whether the smokers, confronted...