Evaluations of group savings and lending programs have largely focused on average impacts, rather than distributional impacts -- finding modest effects on long-term economic well-being. In this paper, we exploit the randomized roll-out of a self-help group lending program in rural Bihar, India...

Digital technologies and fintech firms have rapidly reshaped the consumer financial landscape in recent years, and have the potential to help consumers make better decisions and improve their financial health. Existing technologies such as autopay are also experiencing increased takeup, a trend...

Credit scores are critical for allocating consumer debt in the United States, yet little evidence is available on their performance. We benchmark a widely used credit score against a machine learning model of consumer default and find significant misclassification of borrowers, especially those...

The massive rise in U.S. stockholding during the early twentieth century resulted in the deepening of securities markets, the spread of investment banks, and the expansion of publicly held corporations. This paper makes use of a unique panel database of South Dakota bank stockholders from...

We develop a new approach to identify different categories of depositors during periods of uncertainty and quantify their compensation to remain in the bank. We isolate withdrawals due to liquidity needs, deterioration of fundamentals, and expectation about withdrawal behavior of other...

Collateral requirements play an important role in credit markets. This paper shows that the endowment effect--the phenomenon where owing a good increases one's valuation of it--inhibits demand for loans which use a borrower's existing assets as collateral. Using a field experiment in Kenya, we...

Genetic factors play a major role in the development of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). Observable genetic factors could impact household planning and medical care if they contain actionable information, meaning that they i) are associated with significant harms, ii) reflect...

Using friendship data from Facebook, we study the effects of three aspects of social capital on household financial behavior. We find that the most important measure of social capital in explaining stock market and saving participation is Economic Connectedness, defined as the fraction of one's...

For decades, households' subjective expectations elicited via surveys have been considered meaningless because they often differ substantially from the forecasts of professionals and ex-post realizations. In sharp contrast, the literature we review shows household characteristics and the ways in...

We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framing...