Credit products, serving as an alternative means of payment, have grown in popularity in recent years. Concomitantly, the academic literature has shown interest in the effects of credit on consumption as they are essential to guiding users’ consumption behavior, designing financial marketing strategies, and identifying the value of credit stimulating the economy. A number of studies have investigated this issue, though most of them simply utilized the observations for a single credit channel and/or focused on a given overall effect without considering any dynamics in the consumption changes (e.g., heterogeneous short- or long-term variations). The present study, using a quasi-experimental design with high-resolution transaction data, examined how individual users respond to credit from both a “vertical” (i.e., time-varying) and a “horizontal” (i.e., spillover) perspectives. We applied a widely used regression framework combining propensity score matching (PSM) with difference-in-difference (DiD) modeling to quantify credit effects on consumption. The results showed that credit users' consumption amounts significantly expanded, by 65.4%, after gaining access to credit in the short term. However, over the long term, those users would ultimately curtail that initial consumption expansion to only 16.9% in order to cope with financial constraints. We also revealed and quantified the spillover effects of credit on consumption financed through savings channels. We rationalized users’ consumption-behavior changes after credit activation by drawing on the regulatory focus theory. Our empirical examination, having separated users into promotion- and prevention-focused types, demonstrated diverse consumption patterns (in both the “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions) between them, thus validating our theoretical foundations. Our analyses of the dynamic facts of consumption variation after credit activation contribute both theoretically and empirically to the literature, which theretofore had focused merely on the static or immediate impacts. In this paper, we offer, to both credit company managers and financial policymakers, non-trivial practical implications for the design of marketing strategies or financial stimulus packages
