This paper introduces a novel monthly consumption indicator: the IZA / Fable Data consumption indicator for Germany. It is based on credit card transactions data collected and anonymised by Fable Data from 2017 onwards. We study some of the properties of the data and use a so-called "one year...

This paper uses data from the British National Child Development Study to investigate the relationship between social interaction and participation in the stock market through holding stocks and/or shares at the individual level. In accordance with the existing literature, the results reveal...

Using comparable survey data from twelve European countries we investigate households' attitudes towards mortgage indebtedness. We find that a given debt burden creates much higher distress in Southern countries, France and Belgium, where fewer households have a mortgage outstanding relative to...

Some individuals borrow extensively on their credit cards. This paper tests whether present-biased time preferences correlate with credit card borrowing. In a field study, we elicit individual time preferences with incentivized choice experiments, and match resulting time preference measures to...

The tendency to underestimate the future value of a variable growing at a constant rate, an example of exponential growth bias, has been linked to household financial decision making. We show that exponential growth bias and standard measures of financial literacy are negatively correlated in a...

We investigate the relationship between social interaction and household finances using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We contribute to the existing literature by exploring the relationship between a wide range of aspects of household finances and social interaction, rather than...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts...

This paper studies the direct impact of households' debt on consumption over the business cycle. We use household-level panel data for Spain, and focus on a interesting period of analysis, 2002-2017, characterized by large variations in leverage, consumption, and asset prices. We find that debt...

Many households have insufficient savings to handle moderate and routine consumption shocks. Many of these financially fragile households also have the highest lottery expenditures as a proportion of income. This combination suggests that Prize-Linked Savings (PLS) accounts, that combine...

This paper investigates the potentially non-linear relation between households' indebtedness and their consumption between 2010 and 2014 in Belgium, using panel data from the two waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. Unlike previous studies, we find a negative effect of...