I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Financial inclusion or access to financial services is a major development goal for all nations across the globe. The concept has a multitude of dimensions from payments and savings accounts, credit, insurance and pensions and securities market. Ensuring quality access to formal financial...

Transaction costs impose a barrier to savings, but lowering them may have smaller impacts than expected due to other constraints, such as psychological biases. Within the context of retirement savings under defined contributions in the privatized pension system in Mexico, we analyze two...

This paper studies economies with complete markets where there is positive default on consumer debt. In a simple tractable two-period model, households can default partially, at a finite punishment cost, and competitive intermediaries price loans of different sizes separately. This environment...

We randomly assigned consumer loan requests (of random amount and length) to gender-balanced prospective-borrowers who then randomly submitted them to a representative sample of loan-officers from Chilean banks. We find that loan requests submitted by women are 18.3% less likely to be approved,...

In this paper, I study the role of housing for wealth accumulation and the determination of the equilibrium real interest rate within a continuous-time overlapping generations model that incorporates a realistic demographic structure and households that save for life-cycle and bequest reasons....

Using data from a randomized controlled trial in 300 public high schools in Peru, this paper studies the potential of school-based financial education programs for youth. The intervention improves students’ and teachers’ financial knowledge by 0.14 SD and 0.32 SD, respectively. The impact of...