In the 2001 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 27% of households report simultaneously revolving significant credit card debt and holding sizeable amounts of liquid assets. These consumers report paying, on average, a 14% interest rate on their debt, while earning only 1 or 2% on their...

This article presents a practical methodology to monitor poverty changes among microfinance clients using available household panel data. As an example, it presents an estimation of the net number of people that rose above the $1/day poverty line while members of Grameen Bank and BRAC during...

We develop a dynamic model for analyzing the programs of contractual savings for housing (CSH). We introduce concepts of stability as well as strong and weak stability of trajectories generated by CSH programs, and obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee fulfillment of...

We have assembled a unique loan-level performance dataset for mortgages originated in the UK to study the differences in default likelihood between loans of varying borrower and loan characteristics. We can broadly confirm the relevance of most commonly known riskfactors and find that most...

The effect of income inequality on savings and consumption has remained an open empirical issue despite several decades of research. Results obtained in this study indicate that income inequality and private consumption are both I(1) nonstationary variables that are cointegrated, and inequality...

Out of 11 questions included in the EU harmonised consumer questionnaire, it is possible to construct 2 047 different consumer confidence indicators. We search through all these indicators in order to find the single indicator that has the highest correlation with private consumption growth....

We examine experimentally the effect of complexity on individual decision making. We focus on credit choices, as they have been widely criticized for their complexity in recent years. In a first study, we find that complexity in benefits leads to random mistakes, while complexity in costs leads...