We worked with two microlenders to test impacts of randomly assigned reminders for loan repayments in the text messaging capital of the world. We do not find strong evidence that loss versus gain framing or messaging timing matter. Messages only robustly improve repayment when they include the...

Many policymakers and some behavioral models hold that restricting access to expensive credit helps consumers by preventing overborrowing. The author examines some short-run effects of restricting access, using household panel survey data on payday loan users collected around the imposition of...

Debit cards are overtaking credit cards as the most prevalent form of electronic payment at the point of sale, yet the determinants of a ubiquitous consumer choice-"debit or credit?"-have received relatively little scrutiny. Several stylized facts suggest that debit-card use is driven by...

Does borrowing at 400 percent APR do more harm than good? The Pentagon asserts that payday loans harm military readiness and successfully lobbied for a binding 36 percent APR cap on loans to military members and their families (effective October 1, 2007). But existing evidence on how access to...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the empirical importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology derived from theoretical models. We randomized 58,000 direct mail...

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the largest microlender in Mexico. We find no evidence of transformative impacts on 37 outcomes (although some estimates have...

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its effectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal effects of...

Models of shrouding predict that firms lack incentives to compete on add-on prices. Working with a large Turkish bank to test SMS direct marketing promotions to 108,000 existing checking account holders, we find that messages promoting a large discount on the overdraft interest rate reduce...

Theories of market failures and targeting motivate the promotion of entrepreneurship training programs and generate testable predictions regarding heterogeneous treatment effects from such programs. Using a large randomized evaluation in the United States, we find no strong or lasting effects on...