Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

It is often argued that people might take on too much high-cost debt because they are present focused and/or overoptimistic about how soon they will repay. We measure borrowers' present focus and overoptimism using an experiment with a large payday lender. Although the most inexperienced...

Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes and consequences. We provide some unusually sharp empirical evidence on the extent, mechanics, and dynamics of deceptive advertising. Ski resorts self-report 23 percent more...

"Access to financial services is recognised across the world as a powerful contributor to economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Real Money, New Frontiers is a collection of case studies of innovation in Africa's financial markets, presenting vivid testimony from across...

Exponential growth bias is the pervasive tendency to linearize exponential functions when assessing them intuitively. We show that exponential bias can explain two systematic biases in household finance: the tendency to underestimate an interest rate given other loan terms, and the tendency to...

In this Discussion Paper, Jonathan Zinman, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a visiting scholar with the Payment Cards Center, makes a casual comparison of industry and household data sets which suggests that households underreport credit card borrowing by a factor of...

There is growing interest in using messaging to drive prosocial behaviors, which contribute to investment in public goods. We worked with a leading nongovernmental organization in Peru to randomize nine different prorecycling messages that were crafted on the basis of best practices, prior...

Group liability is often portrayed as the key innovation that led to the explosion of the microcredit movement, which grew with the Grameen Bank in the 1970s and continues on today with hundreds of institutions around the world. Group liability claims to improve repayment rates and lower...