This paper studies how and why households adjust their spending, saving, and borrowing in response to transitory income shocks. We leverage new large-scale survey data to first quantitatively assess households' intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and deleverage (MPDs) (the...

We provide a general framework for incorporating many types of micro data from summary statistics to full surveys of selected consumers into Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995)-style estimates of differentiated products demand systems. We extend best practices for BLP estimation in Conlon and...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

We characterize the large number of mortgage offers for which people qualify in the United Kingdom. Very few pick the cheapest option, nonetheless the one selected is not usually noticeably more expensive. A few borrowers make very expensive choices. These are most common when the menu they face...

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...

We use an experiment to test whether consumers optimally acquire information on energy costs in appliance markets where, like many contexts, consumers are poorly informed and make mistakes despite freely-available information. We find consumers acquire information suboptimally; there is little...

We present the first objective evidence on how COVID-19 lockdowns affected internet browser usage in Africa, using detailed digital trace data on PC-based and mobile-based browsing patterns of 316 Kenyans who had access to a PC, covering the period before and during Kenya's first national...

The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors' attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-representative longitudinal survey data...

One of the most important financial decisions that pension participants make concerns how they access their pension assets when they terminate employment with their plan sponsor. Their choices depend both on own preferences and the options offered by their retirement plan. This paper examines...