In a representative sample of new borrowers, access to lines of credit increases the spending of more liquid households permanently. Liquid consumers reduce their existing savings but do not tap into negative deposits, and hence do not raise debt. Through our FinTech bank setting, we elicit...

We show that, when forming expectations about aggregate inflation, consumers rely on the prices of goods in their personal grocery bundles. Our analysis uses novel representative micro data that uniquely match individual expectations, detailed information about consumption bundles, and...

With a binding effective lower bound on interest rates and large government deficits, conventional policies are unviable and policymakers resort to unconventional policies, which target households' expectations directly. Using unique micro data and a difference-in-differences strategy, we assess...

Consumers might overestimate optimal spending if forming beliefs based on others' spending, because others' conspicuous consumption is more visible than the rest of their consumption. If true, information about others' overall spending should change beliefs and choice. For a test, we provide...

Expectations about macro-finance variables, such as inflation, vary significantly across genders, even within the same household. We conjecture that traditional gender roles expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives, which in turn produce systematic variation in...

Expectations about macro-finance variables, such as inflation, vary significantly across genders, even within the same household. We conjecture that traditional gender roles expose women and men to different economic signals in their daily lives, which in turn produce systematic variation in...

We study the spending response of first-time borrowers to an overdraft facility and elicit their preferences, beliefs, and motives through a FinTech application. Users increase their spending permanently, lower their savings rate, and reallocate spending from non-discretionary to discretionary...

We document that a large fraction of a representative population of men—those below the top of the distribution by cognitive abilities (IQ)—barely reacts to measures of monetary and fiscal policy that aim at influencing their leverage and durable spending decisions. To the contrary, high-IQ...

Forecast errors for inflation decline monotonically with both verbal and quantitative IQ in a large and representative male population. Within individuals, inflation expectations and perceptions are autocorrelated only for men above the median by IQ (high-IQ men). High-IQ men's forecast...

We show that, to form aggregate inflation expectations, consumers rely on the price changes they face in their daily lives while grocery shopping. Specifically, the frequency and size of price changes, rather than their expenditure share, matter for individuals' inflation expectations. To...