We explore how households insure themselves against consumption volatility. We asked households how they would fund an unexpected emergency consumption expense equivalent to one month's income. Answers reveal a range of consumption insurance mechanisms, including borrowing from credit markets...

Using detailed and highly-disaggregated data on spending, income, bank account balances, and consumer credit, we examine the tendency of individuals to “co-hold”, i.e., to simultaneously hold low-interest liquid deposit balances and high-interest debt in the form of overdrafts. The...

We explore the effects of round number preferences in credit card payments. Payments at round numbers are very common: 70% of manual non-full credit card payments are at round numbers. Using minimum payment amounts as a natural experiment for the lower bound on payments, we show stickiness in...

In Gathergood et al. (forthcoming), we studied credit card repayments using linked data on multiple cards from the United Kingdom. We showed that individuals did not allocate payments to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing, but instead made repayments...

People suffer financial distress when they face financial and non-financial difficulties from repaying their outstanding debts. This paper analyses the prevalence of financial distress, how this distress is related to consumer credit use, and whether financial distress can be predicted. We aim...

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the economic stakes, which is inconsistent with...

We use survey data from a sample of UK households to analyse the relationship between financial literacy and consumer credit portfolios. We show that individuals who borrow on consumer credit exhibit worse financial literacy than those who do not. Borrowers with poor financial literacy hold...

The 'financial accelerator' model when applied to households states that shocks to household balance sheets (primarily changes in house prices) amplify fluctuations in consumer spending by tightening or relaxing collateral constraints on borrowing. We construct an alternative model where...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...

The disposition effect is the reluctance to sell assets at a loss relative to a salient point of reference, typically assumed to be the purchase price. Using data on stocks and housing sales, we show that the peak price achieved by an asset during the investor's period of holding constitutes an...