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...

The champions of financial inclusion regret women’s lack of access to credit, while critics of financialization, by contrast, claim that women have become overly indebted. But little is actually known about women’s debt/credit in quantitative terms, mostly due to a lack of data. This...

This paper introduces a key factor influencing households' decision to invest in the stock market: how people view stockholders. Using surveys we conducted with nearly 8,500 individuals from eleven countries, we document that a large majority of respondents view stockholders negatively they are...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – inparticular instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling forfinancial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed householdsparticularly use personal...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...