Unpaid credit card debt can be problematic; people should avoid it where possible. Unlike prior studies, this paper examines the relative strength of the association of financial literacy, attitude towards balancing spending and savings, and financial satisfaction with credit card debt-taking...

Innovations in financial technology have expanded individuals' access to unsecured personal loans. Building on insights from consumer behavior research that link negative emotions to credit-financed consumption, we show that transitory emotion influences households' use of online loans....

Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by constructing a large panel of BNPL...

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....

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...

This study shows that individuals' habits in grocery shopping are incrementally useful in predicting their credit card payment behaviors and that such incremental predictive power can translate into incremental profits for firms. Guided by prior work, we identify five broad grocery shopping...

The family home is the most important asset on household balance sheets, aside from human capital. Choosing a suitable mortgage is therefore critical to financial well-being but households often make costly mistakes. We collect data in an online survey to test borrowers' comfort with, and...

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

Banking services can now be delivered digitally and many banks are downsizing their physical operations. Bank customers are also relying less on physical locations because of digital banking. Is geography indeed now less important for banks? Using quasi-exogenous closures of ATMs in a densely...

This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. In a lab experiment, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate income expectations by letting income depend on relative...