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 this paper, I conduct an international comparison of the financial health of households using data on household wealth and indebtedness for the Group of Seven (G7) countries and show that, even though household borrowings in Japan were the highest among the G7 countries, at least until 2000,...

Our data indicate significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US in spite of income paths at older ages exhibiting similar declines. We examine several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths...

We present a vision for improving household financial surveys by integrating responses from questionnaires more completely with financial statements and combining them with payments data from diaries. Integrated household financial accounts—-balance sheet, income statement, and statement of...

We examine the self-control problems of U.S households and their effects on households' retirement preparedness based on the Behavioral Life-Cycle Hypothesis. Using the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances dataset, the level of retirement adequacy was estimated with income replacement ratio (IRR),...

This study examines the divergence between objective and subjective assessment of retirement adequacy, analyzing U.S. households with a full-time worker age 35 to 60 in the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances. Of those households, 58% have objective inadequacy, and 54% have subjective inadequacy,...

This paper develops a time series model for aggregate consumption to predict the U.S. personal saving rate. It then uses the model to test whether there has been a structural break in consumption behavior because of the 2008 financial crisis. Before the crisis, the personal saving rate was...

This study examined the profile of student loans in the U.S., identifying the determinants of three types of financial burdens attributable to student loans: (1) outstanding balance; (2) loan payment-to-income ratio, and (3) loan delinquency. The pooled dataset from the 2010 to 2013 Survey of...