There is an apparent rift between the way banks calculate and the way humans think.On the one hand, exponential discounting has played a centuries-long, lead role in financial analysis. On the other hand, experiments by behavioral economists demonstrate that hyperbolic discounting is better than...

Using an online experiment, we examine to what extent people are ready to bear negative interest rates (NIR hereafter) on their savings. We find some tolerance to NIR, i.e. people being willing to let money in the bank, rather than spend it, and thereby accepting to have less at some later time...

Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption...

Unpaid credit card debt can be problematic; people should avoid it where possible. Unlike prior studies, this paper examines the relative strength of the association of financial literacy, attitude towards balancing spending and savings, and financial satisfaction with credit card debt-taking...

Digital financial services (DFS) have rapidly expanded in recent years, largely driven by fintech and further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are growing concerns that traditional financial literacy is insufficient to empower individuals to effectively access and use DFS. Digital...

How do borrowers repay their debts? In two simple debt repayment experiments, we not only elicit different types of severe deviations from optimal, i.e. debt minimizing, repayment decisions. We rather show how these deviations can be triggered using supposedly irrelevant information and find...

We examined the association between financial knowledge overconfidence and the perception of emergency fund needs using the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) dataset. Only 28% of respondents reported a perceived amount of emergency funds needed that would cover at least 3 months of...

The family home is the most important asset on household balance sheets, aside from human capital. Choosing a suitable mortgage is therefore critical to financial well-being but households often make costly mistakes. We collect data in an online survey to test borrowers' comfort with, and...

We elicit consumer perceptions about the interest rate associated with credit-card borrowing. Combining bank account data and surveys, we find that consumers have very noisy perceptions about the true interest costs associated with credit card debt. Total borrowing decreases with perceived...

Lowering a borrower’s interest rate is one of the most effective ways to reduce a borrower’s debt burden. Mortgage refinancing offers a chance to shift debt balances from high-interest loans into a low-interest mortgage through “cashing out” some of the home’s equity. Borrowers could...