We use micro data on young married households from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers in order to analyze the importance of borrowing constraints in Japan. We find (1) that 8 to 15 percent of young married Japanese households are borrowing-constrained, (2) that household assets and the...

Do asset prices affect real activity? This question has taken on a new importance in recent years, as asset values first surged at the end of 1990s and, thereafter, dramatically retreated. This report reviews the available theoretical and empirical evidence regarding asset price and wealth...

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain...

Informal lending and savings institutions exist around the world, and often include regular door-to-door deposit collection of cash. Some banks have adopted similar services in order to expand access to banking services in areas that lack physical branches. Using a randomized control trial, we...

Expanding credit access is a key ingredient of development strategies worldwide. Microfinance practitioners, policymakers, and donors have ambitious goals for expanding access, and seek efficient methods for implementing and evaluating expansion. There is less consensus on the role of consumer...

The price elasticity of demand for credit has major implications for macroeconomics, finance, and development. We present estimates of this parameter derived from a randomized trial. The experiment was implemented by a consumer microfinance lender in South Africa and identifies demand curves...

This paper aims to understand what motivates the adoption of key renewable energy technologies (RET) in early adopter markets. Electrification of heat and transport, through the deployment of heat pumps, electric vehicles and solar photovoltaic panels, combined with renewable sources of...

This paper explores the motivations behind the adoption of key renewable energy technologies in an early adopter market. Notwithstanding their social benefits, uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and solar photovoltaic panels remains low, necessitating targeted measures to address this. We...

This study explores the impact of socio-demographic, behavioural, and built-environment characteristics on residential renewable energy technology adoption. It provides new insights on factors influencing uptake using nearest neighbour and random forest machine learning models at a granular...

Integrating economic experiments into household surveys provides unique possibilities. We introduce the German Socio-Economic Panel's Innovation Sample (SOEPIS), which offers researchers detailed panel data and the possibility to collect personalized experimental and survey data for free. We...