Since the late 1990s, the mean education payment-to-income ratio, a marker for the transitory burden related to student loans, has fallen steeply while repayment terms have become longer. The overall level of student debt has dramatically increased, suggesting that the level of student debt and...

We conducted two large-scale, highly powered randomized controlled trials intended to encourage consumer debt repayments. In Study 1, we implemented five treatments varying the design of envelopes sent to debtors. We did not find any treatment effects on response and repayment rates compared to...

This study investigates the welfare implications of allowing workers the option to dedicate their employer-sponsored retirement benefits to the repayment of their student debt. Using a partial equilibrium model, I find that this policy allows for increased consumption while young, while reducing...

In this study, we explore the relationship between the debt service ratio (DSR) and individual borrowers' ability to withstand shocks in Malaysia. Using a micro-level dataset that matches borrowers' debt and income, we quantify the financial resilience of individual borrowers and subsequently...

How do persistent cash flow shocks affect debt repayment across the distribution of households? Using individual data on natural gas shale royalty payments matched with credit bureau data for 215,639 consumers, we estimate that individuals repay 33 cents of debt per dollar of windfall, and that...

How do borrowers repay their debts? In two simple debt repayment experiments, we not only elicit different types of severe deviations from optimal, i.e. debt minimizing, repayment decisions. We rather show how these deviations can be triggered using supposedly irrelevant information and find...