Due to the financial crisis, an increasing number of households face financial problems. This may lead to an increasing need for monitoring spending and budgets. We demonstrate that both cash and the debit card are perceived as helpful in this respect. We show that, on average, consumers...

Although it is often asserted that the housing cost burden is one of the key determinants of household economic hardship, in practice the linkage between the two has been rarely explored. The focus has been instead on the role played by income or other socio-economic determinants of household...

Numerous laboratory studies find that minor nuances of presentation and description change behavior in ways that are inconsistent with standard economic models. How much do these context effects matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to...

We study how consumers allocate debt across credit cards they already hold using new data on credit card activity for a representative sample of consumers with two homogeneous cards in Mexico. We find that relative prices are a very weak predictor of the allocation of debt, purchases, and...

We examine the relationship between household wealth and self-control. Although self-control has been linked to consumption and financial behavior, its measurement remains an open issue. We employ a definition of self-control failure that follows literature in psychology, suggesting that three...

We investigate, using the 2002 US Health and Retirement Study, the factors influencing individuals' insecurity and expectations about terrorism, and study the effects these last have on households' portfolio choices and spending patterns. We find that females, the religiously devout, those...

Based on the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we show that household consumption drops after a child moves out of a household, while at the same time, per capita consumption increases significantly. Parents approximately upgrade...

We study how consumers allocate debt across credit cards they already hold using new data on credit card activity for a representative sample of consumers with two homogeneous cards in Mexico. We find that relative prices are a very weak predictor of the allocation of debt, purchases, and...

House and flat prices have been through a tremendous bust and boom cycle in Denmark. From 1986 to 1993 real prices for houses and flats dropped by one third on average, foreclosures accounted for around 1/6 of the house and flat turnovers in numbers, and in reality the market for owner-occupied...

CONSUMER CREDIT IN ITALY: WELL-BEING OR FINANCIAL FRAGILITY?Demand for consumer credit on the part of Italian households has risen sharply in recent years. According to the economic reference models for analysis of the choices made by households in terms of consumption, saving and indebtedness,...