Most US credit card holders revolve high-interest debt, often combined with substantial (i) asset accumulation by retirement, and (ii) low-rate liquid assets. Hyperbolic discounting can resolve only the former puzzle (Laibson et al., 2003). Bertaut and Haliassos (2002) proposed an...

By 1998, about two-thirds of U.S. households held a bank-type credit card. Despite high interest rates, most revolve credit card debt. The majority of debt revolvers have substantial liquid assets, apparently violating arbitrage. We propose an "accountant-shopper" model that could provide an...

Most US credit card holders revolve high-interest debt, often with substantial liquid and retirement assets. We model separation of accounting from shopping allowed by credit cards, in a rational, dynamic game. When the shopper is more impatient than the accountant, selling assets to repay debt...

Theory often suggests that wider household participation in stockholding reduces wealth inequality by expanding access. Empirical participation literature raises concerns that newcomers may be less educated, less sophisticated, and poorer. We use SCF data to decompose changes in wealth...

Most US credit card holders revolve high-interest debt, often combined with substantial (i) asset accumulation by retirement, and (ii) low-rate liquid assets. Hyperbolic discounting can resolve only the former puzzle (Laibson et al., 2003). Bertaut and Haliassos (2002) proposed an...

We document and study international differences in both ownership and holdings of stocks, private businesses, homes, and mortgages among households aged fifty or more in thirteen countries, using new and comparable survey data. We employ counterfactual techniques to decompose observed...

This paper provides a joint analysis of household stockholding participation, stock location among stockholding modes, and participation spillovers, using data from the US Survey of Consumer Finances. Our multivariate choice model matches observed participation rates, conditional and...

Existing findings suggest that standard, frictionless, expected-utility models have difficulty accounting for average and for median holdings of wealth and of risky assets, partly as a result of the largely unexplained limited proportion of stockholders among households. We analyze life-cycle...

The paper deals with a newly discovered credit card puzzle. Many US households revolve a balance on high-interest credit cards while holding low-interest liquid or total safe assets that could be used to repay this balance. Such behavior seems to ignore obvious arbitrage opportunities and to...