We use a new panel dataset of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 Federal income tax rebates. We estimate the monthly response of credit card payments, spending, and debt, exploiting the unique, randomized timing of the rebate disbursement. We find that, on...

From 1980 to 2004, the number of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States increased more than five-fold, from 288,000 to 1.5 million per year. Lenders responded to the high filing rate with a major lobbying campaign for bankruptcy reform that led to the adoption in 2005 of the Bankruptcy...

Objective - In recent years, banks have been very interested in encouraging non-cash payment activities in Vietnam. Especially, payment by credit card has recently become a popular consumer behavior in the rural area. This paper aims to evaluate the development of credit cards in the Vietnam...

In the context of a new regulation of interchange fees for card payments, the European Commission proposes to force the splitting of the card scheme in two legally and organizationally independent entities: one that would develop the ‘brand” and continue selling licences to payment...

Australia's payment card regulations are similar to those used in a variety of countries around the world. However, as we argue below, they are complex, open to gaming and have failed to win support from consumers.In this paper, we present an alternative approach to regulation involving direct...

We survey individuals on their credit card usage. Contrary to popular press, most credit card holders use credit cards in a responsible manner. They tend to use credit cards for transaction convenience and pay little interest costs. Only a minor subset of people uses credit cards to access...

This paper provides novel field-experimental evidence on status goods. We work with an Indonesian bank that markets platinum credit cards to high-income customers. In a first experiment, we show that demand for the platinum card greatly exceeds demand for a nondescript control product with...

In recent years, regulators in various parts of the world have capped interchange fees on debit and credit cards. The justification for the caps rests to a large extent on the argument that these cards have, for certain merchants, become must-take cards rather than ‘wanna-take cards'. That is,...

We study an at-scale natural experiment in which debit cards are given to cash transfer recipients who already have a bank account. Using administrative account data and household surveys, we find that beneficiaries accumulate a savings stock equal to 2 percent of annual income after two years...

Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein's (1998) theory of mental accounting: that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient forms of consumption more quickly than expenditure...