How does gaining access to expensive credit affect the well-being of credit-constrained households? I use plausibly exogenous zip code level variation in the temporal accessibility of payday loans to examine the causal effects of access to payday loans on household well-being. Using suicide...

We report the results of a longitudinal intervention with students across five universities in China designed to reduce online consumer debt. Our research design allocates individuals to either a financial literacy treatment, a self-control training program, or a zero-touch control group. The...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Traditional financial literacy interventions are frequently ineffective at improving financial outcomes. We test an alternative approach using a field experiment with over 400,000 student loan borrowers in which treatment group members received communications about the availability of their FICO...

This paper utilizes high-quality transaction data from the largest bank in Denmark to study what drives the demand for high-cost consumption loans. I investigate the extent to which adverse events drive loan demand, or if it is more likely to be explained by borrowers' personality traits. I find...

We find that competition from payday lenders leads depository institutions to raise overdraft fees and reduce the availability of “free” checking accounts. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks’ practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the...

To sustain growth in an aging economy, it is important to ease the financing of small firms by bank loans. Using bank internal data of small business loans in Germany, we examine the determinants of loan rates in the period 1995-2010. Beyond characteristics of the firm, the loan contract, and...

On December 16th of 2015, the Fed initiated "liftoff," raising the federal funds rate range by 25 basis points and ending a 7-year regime of near-zero rates. We use a unique dataset of 640,000 loan-hour observations to measure the impact of liftoff on interest rates in the peer-to-peer lending...

We use Household Budget Survey data to analyze the evolution of the household credit market in the Czech Republic over the period 2000–2008. We next merge our data with the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions in 2005–2008, in order to test the validity of the standard debt burden...

While theory predicts different effects of household credit and enterprise credit on the economy, the empirical literature has mainly used aggregate measures of overall bank lending to the private sector. We construct a new dataset from 45 developed and developing countries, decomposing bank...