I estimate the effect of lottery winnings on peers' debt accumulation using administrative data from Norway. I identify neighbors of lottery winners, and estimate an average debt response of 2.1 percent of the lottery prize among households that live up to ten houses from the winner. Analyzing...

Financial inclusion or access to financial services, is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. Financial inclusion does not concern only "access, but also the "use"" of financial services. This paper examines the loan taking behavior of individuals based on survey of 844...

Every year over 20 states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) on specific items like clothes, shoes and other items to encourage consumption, effecting over 100 million consumers. We use a unique dataset of credit cards transaction to study the spending response to these holidays. Using a...

We report evidence that salience may have economically significant effects on homeowners' borrowing behavior, through a bias in favour of less salient but more costly loans. We outline a simple model in which some consumers are biased. Under plausible assumptions, the bias may affect prices in...

We show how a regulatory disclosure of hidden debt can eliminate a large mispricing in housing. In a setting where homebuyers must combine several sources of debt, they are biased towards hidden loans, especially if they are young, or have no experience in financial investments or home...

Using new household-level data, we quantitatively assess the roles that job loss, negative equity, and wealth (including unsecured debt, liquid assets, and illiquid assets) play in default decisions. In sharp contrast to prior studies that proxy for individual unemployment status using regional...

We explore the effects of mandatory third-party review of mortgage contracts on the terms, availability, and performance of mortgage credit. Our study is based on a legislative experiment in which the State of Illinois required 'high-risk' mortgage applicants acquiring or refinancing properties...

A main goal of health insurance is to smooth out the financial risk that comes with health shocks and health care. Nevertheless, there has been relatively sparse evidence on how health insurance affects financial outcomes. The few studies that exist focus on the effect of gaining health...

In this paper we use Norwegian tax data and a novel natural experiment to isolate the impact of job loss risk on saving behavior. We find that a one percentage point increase in job loss risk increases liquid savings by roughly 1.2 - 2.0 percent. Further, we show that employment falls in...