Traditional financial literacy interventions are frequently ineffective at improving financial outcomes. We test an alternative approach using a field experiment with over 400,000 student loan borrowers in which treatment group members received communications about the availability of their FICO...

In this paper, we provide a framework for conceptualizing and identifying differences between anchors and targets (i.e., non-status quo reference points). While these two types of values are often treated interchangeably by academic audiences, they recruit meaningfully different psychological...

Consumers can prefer a price disclosure format that can cost them. Across a variety of products, we find that many consumers prefer partitioned price disclosures (i.e., separating charges into multiple line items without totals) to consolidated disclosures (i.e., those displaying the total price...

This chapter reviews recent advances in the literature on mental accounting - the process by which people group expenses into categories, assign funds to these categories, determine budgets, and perform elements of cost-benefit analyses. We focus in particular on mental accounting within the...

Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the US mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability. Being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high...

Although budgeting is widely considered a common method of managing household finances, surprisingly little is known about the budgeting process. Using a nationally-representative survey (N=3,826) of US adults, we examine budgeting behaviors and beliefs, including who budgets and why, how...

Textbook finance theory assumes that investors strategically try to insure themselves against bad future states of the world when forming portfolios. This is a testable assumption, surveys are ideally suited to test it, and we develop a framework for doing so. Our framework combines survey...

Development of an effective vaccine that protects against COVID-19 is widely considered one of the best paths to ending the current health crisis. While the ability to create and distribute such a vaccine in the short-term remains uncertain, the availability of a vaccine alone will not be...

One in five consumer credit accounts incur late fees each quarter. Evidence on the efficacy of regulations to improve behavior through enhanced disclosure of financial product attributes is mixed. We test a novel form of disclosure that provides borrowers with a personalized measure of their...