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...

This paper shows that monetary policy and prudential policies interact. U.S. banks issue more commercial and industrial loans to emerging market borrowers when U.S. monetary policy eases. The effect is less pronounced for banks that are more constrained through the U.S. bank stress tests,...

We use Norwegian administrative panel data on wealth and income between 1993 and 2015 to study lifecycle wealth dynamics, focusing on the wealthiest households. On average, the wealthiest start their lives substantially richer than other households in the same cohort, own mostly private equity,...

We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...

The role of inherited wealth in modern economies has increasingly become under scrutiny. This study presents one of the first attempts to shed light on how demographic aging could shape this role. We show that, in the absence of retirement annuities, or for a given level of annuitization, both...

This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a liquid financial asset...

Using detailed tax data from the Swiss canton of Bern, I examine how changes in wealth are related to income risk. I find that only among elderly individuals high kurtosis of income risk may be positively correlated with wealth accumulation. Additionally, I document that a substantial share of...

We use sizeable lottery prizes in Norwegian administrative panel data to characterize households' marginal propensities to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and how lottery prizes are spent and saved over time. We...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...