Debit cards are overtaking credit cards as the most prevalent form of electronic payment at the point of sale, yet the determinants of a ubiquitous consumer choice - "debit or credit?" - have received relatively little scrutiny. Several stylized facts suggest that debit-card use is driven by...

Banks impose a variety of account fees, and credit card issuers impose a variety of fees related to card usage. Using detailed data from a 2021 representative diary survey of US consumers, we investigate whether lower-income consumers and Black consumers are more likely to pay bank account or...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers' retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers' retirement income goals. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on...

The transition from the state ownership to market mechanisms in Hungary fundamentally altered the geography of domestic micro, small, and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study investigates the spatial and temporal evolution of owner numbers, using data on all Hungarian SMEs between 1991 and 2019...

Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effective policies that decrease gender inequalities and improve women's financial literacy, agency and empowerment. Accordingly, in this paper, we adopt a multidimensional approach to measure financial...

This paper empirically studies how college savings motives affect household stock market participation. More than 65% of households saving for college allocate at least a portion of their college savings to stocks, which are also the most popular class of risky assets for college savings...

Inflation expectations are central to economics because they affect the effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy as well as realized inflation. We survey the recent literature with a focus on the inflation expectations of households. We first review standard data sources and discuss their...

Using German and US brokerage data we find that investors are more likely to sell speculative stocks trading at a gain. Investors' gain realizations are monotonically increasing in a stock's speculativeness. This translates into a high disposition effect for speculative and a much lower...

We study the effects of monetary policy on aggregate consumption combining a heterogeneous agent model with measured expectations under different policy counterfactuals. We express the consumption of non-hand-to-mouth households as a function of expectations only and elicit all expectations...