Institutions often offer a menu of contracts to consumers in an attempt to create a separating equilibrium that reveals borrower types and provides better pricing. We test the effectiveness of a specific set of contracts in the mortgage market: mortgage points. Points allow borrowers to exchange...

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we perform a lab experiment designed to study the eff ects of social image concerns and peer...

We study how consumers allocate debt across credit cards they already hold using new data on credit card activity for a representative sample of consumers with two homogeneous cards in Mexico. We find that relative prices are a very weak predictor of the allocation of debt, purchases, and...

Based on the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP), we show that household consumption drops after a child moves out of a household, while at the same time, per capita consumption increases significantly. Parents approximately upgrade...

We analyze whether the frequent use of credit lines is rational or influenced by behavioral traits of households. We consider the special case of Germany where credit lines on current accounts are available to 80% of the population. We document that the excessive usage of costly credit lines is...

We examine the relationship between household wealth and self-control. Although self-control has been linked to consumption and financial behavior, its measurement remains an open issue. We employ a definition of self-control failure that follows literature in psychology, suggesting that three...

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...

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...

Since the financial crisis financial literacy has attracted growing interest among researchers and policy makers, as there is international empirical evidence that financial literacy is poor among both adults and students. In Germany we have almost no empirical evidence on financial literacy,...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...