Higher sales tax in the home country relative to a neighboring country creates a huge incentive for consumers who live closer to the border to purchase goods across the border. Using a unique panel dataset of consumer financial transactions, we find that, when facing higher domestic sales tax,...

This paper uses a dataset from one of the leading subprime lenders in America, containing detailed information on borrower and loan characteristics, finds that borrowers from the financial industry, who have higher financial literacy, are less likely to default. This effect cannot be explained...

Using account-level credit card data from a major Turkish bank we show the impact of a unique restrictive credit card policy on consumption and debt repayment behavior. The complex policy imposes two types of soft liquidity constraints for certain credit card holders: progressively higher...

We study local employment, establishment density, and establishment size across industries delivering final consumption, which comprise a substantial fraction of production, shape local amenities, and pay different wages. In a stylized model of consumer mobility, lower industry...

We use detailed information from U.S. consumers' credit card purchases to provide the first large scale description of the geography of consumption. We find that consumers' mobility is quite limited and document significant heterogeneity in the importance of gravity across sectors. We develop a...

This paper estimates how online consumer spending responds to changes in air pollution. We address the endogeneity of air pollution in affecting household consumption by exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in air quality caused by China's Huai River heating policy. We use a comprehensive...

Using a unique administrative level dataset from a large and diverse U.S. financial institution, we test the impact of rewards on credit card spending and debt. Specifically, we study the impact of cash-back rewards on individuals before and during their enrollment in the program. We find that...

Using unique data from multiple large-scale randomized marketing trials of pre-approved credit card solicitations, we find that consumers responding to a lender's inferior solicitation offers have poorer credit quality attributes. This finding supports the argument that riskier type borrowers...

Every year many states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes and school supplies from the state sales tax. We use two data sets, the Diary portion of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and a unique data set of credit cards transactions, to investigate the...

The recent financial crisis has led to calls for a better understanding of the reasons behind the increase in mortgage defaults and the foreclosures that followed. Previous studies using option-based mortgage default models predicted that borrowers should immediately exercise the default option...