This paper is the first in the literature to examine the determinants of US credit card penalty fees. Many critics of credit card fees - including a number of US Senators - have argued that credit card penalty fees reflect banks' market share. Using a unique data set we find that fees are...

Recent research finds that poorer individuals make financial mistakes when the decisions are difficult and rare. We examine who makes financial mistakes involving decisions that are easier and more frequent – specifically, the inadvertent failure to pay monthly credit card balances when...

This paper shows that exchange rates respond to only the surprise component of an actual US monetary policy change and that failure to disentangle the surprise component from the actual monetary policy change can lead to an underestimation of the impact of monetary policy, or even to a false...

This paper is the first to utilize the informational content embodied in Federal funds futures contracts for extracting day-to-day changes in expectations of future US monetary policy, in the context of a study of day-to-day exchange rate changes. We analyze more than 12 years of daily exchange...