We document five effects of providing individuals with crowdsourced spending information about their peers (individuals with similar characteristics) through a FinTech app. First, users who spend more than their peers reduce their spending significantly, whereas users who spend less keep...

We evaluate the income elasticity of the aggregate budget share spent on a sub-group of commodities, in a competitive framework, by a continuum of agents having the same income, but heterogeneous behavior described by an "homothetic preferences scaling factor" having a bounded Pareto...

The way that consumers make payments is changing rapidly and attracts important current policy interest. This paper develops and estimates a structural model of adoption and use of payment instruments by U.S. consumers. We use a cross-section of data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a...

The way that consumers make payments is changing rapidly and attracts important current policy interest. This paper develops and estimates a structural model of adoption and use of payment instruments by U.S. consumers. We use a cross-section of data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a...

In recent years, some Canadian politicians and powerful interest groups have issued increasingly vocal calls for dramatic regulatory interventions into the country's payment cards system. In particular, they have called for a "hard cap" price-controls on interchange fees, a ban on contractual...

We measure consumers' readiness to face emergency expenses. Based on data from a representative survey of US consumers, we find that financial readiness varies widely across consumers, with lowest-income, least-educated, unemployed, and black consumers most likely to have $0 saved for emergency...

Evaluating a new survey dataset of German consumers, we test whether individual consumption plans are formed according to an Euler equation derived from consumption life-cycle models. Estimating several consumption Euler equations, the results are mostly in line with the theory: We find evidence...

The main goal of this article is to describe the attitudes towards bequests as the motive for saving up for old age. The article reports the results of our own qualitative and quantitative research. The reasons for additional, voluntary saving up for old age, as seen in the conducted qualitative...

This paper studies why investors buy dividend-paying assets and how they time their consumption accordingly. We combine administrative bank data linking customers' consumption transactions and income to detailed portfolio data and survey responses on financial behavior. We find that private...

This paper studies consumption and savings decisions of Danish households before and during the financial crisis as well as in the more recent years characterized by negative policy rates. While all household groups decreased their consumption ratios immediately in response to the financial...