Does advertising help consumers to find the products they need or push them to buy products they don't need? In this paper, we study the effects of advertising on consumer mistakes and quantify the resulting effect on consumer welfare in the market for mortgage refinancing. Mortgage borrowers...

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...

We examine whether advertising increases household debt by studying the initial expansion of television in the 1950’s. Exploiting the idiosyncratic spread of television across markets, we use microdata from the Survey of Consumer Finances to test whether households with early access to...

Firms spend billions of dollars each year advertising consumer products in order to influence demand. Much of these outlays are on the creative design of advertising content. Creative content often uses nuances of presentation and framing that have large effects on consumer decision making in...

This paper studies whether exposure to mass media and liking advertising are associated with an increased impulse buy tendency, and whether the availability of a credit card acts as a facilitating stimulus. It is found that impulse buys are positively associated with exposure to commercial...