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...

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...

Most cardholders have more than one credit card, yet, it is not evident how these individuals manage their accounts. In this paper we construct a novel data set that includes information on all the credit cards held by more than 10,000 consumers in Mexico in 2004 and 2005 and empirically study...

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...

How did small exporters fare relative to large exporters during the 2008-09 crisis? Examining the performance of Mexican exporters reveals that crisis did not make smaller exporters more likely to exit, growless, or expand their product line less. Workhorse models of trade, in response to an...

Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on governments agendas, espite the fact that the empirical evidence on its effectiveness is scarce. To measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act-type disclosures on default and indebtedness, as well as of...

We are first paper to study the economic effects of drug-trafficking organization violence. We exploit the manyfold increase in homicides in 2008-2011 in Mexico resulting from its war on organized drug traffickers to estimate the effect of drug-related homicides on house prices. We use an...

There has been increasing concern that the difficulty of obtaining firm operation licences in developing countries may decrease firm creation and increase informality. We estimate the effect on new firm creation/registration of a program that speeds up firm registration procedures and makes them...

Generally speaking, better educated countries have better governments, an empirical regularity that holds in both dictatorships and democracies. We suggest that a possible reason for this fact is that educated people are more likely to complain about misconduct by government officials, so that,...