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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Using comprehensive high-frequency state and local sales tax data, we show that shopping behavior responds strongly to changes in sales tax rates. Even though sales taxes are not observed in posted prices and have a wide range of rates and exemptions, consumers adjust in many dimensions. They...

We use monthly credit card data from the Federal Reserve's Y-14M reports to study the early impact of the COVID-19 shock on the use and availability of consumer credit. First, we find that in counties severely affected by the pandemic, creditworthy borrowers reduce their credit card balances and...

This paper studies the direct impact of households' debt on consumption over the business cycle. We use household-level panel data for Spain, and focus on a interesting period of analysis, 2002-2017, characterized by large variations in leverage, consumption, and asset prices. We find that debt...

This paper studies the direct impact of households' debt on consumption over the business cycle. We use household-level panel data for Spain, and focus on a interesting period of analysis, 2002-2017, characterized by large variations in leverage, consumption, and asset prices. We find that debt...