Financial technology (FT) has been credited for supporting sustainable development and financial inclusion. However, issues such as balancing innovation with consumer protection and the challenges of loan default have emerged as significant concerns in this context. The study aimed to test the...

Financial literacy represents a fundamental competence in contemporary knowledge-based economies, particularly in the context of increasingly complex corporate financing instruments. Insufficient financial literacy may lead to suboptimal debt decisions, inefficient capital structures, and...

Since the 2018 Murphy v. NCAA decision, 38 states have legalized mobile sports betting. We study effects on betting and consumer credit, emphasizing spatial spillovers across state lines. Using consumer spending data and an extended two-way fixed effects framework that separately identifies...

How borrowers respond to future changes in the interest rate on their debt matters for the transmission of monetary policy and for household financial stability. Combining bank data, a letter RCT, and a survey, we study this question in the context of the German mortgage market, where since 2022...

We investigate how the use of bankruptcy as an implicit health insurance varies across households, focusing on heterogeneity by asset holdings, race, marital status, and educational attainment. Using a difference-in-differences design based on the 2005 bankruptcy reform, we find that the reform...

This paper examines the behavioural patterns of Canadian borrowers as they progress toward mortgage delinquency. Using the full universe of TransUnion borrower credit data from 2015 to 2024, we document that mortgage holders begin increasing their credit utilization roughly two years before...

This study investigates the probability of consumer default across both secured and unsecured assets, with a particular focus on borrower behavior and the role of moral hazard in shaping individual credit risk. It examines how different borrower decisions, such as investing in secured and...

Household debt is a critical component of family financial management, especially considering the prevalence of credit constraints. This study investigates the determinants of Chinese household debt structure, focusing on the choice between formal and informal borrowing and the proportion of...

Buy Now, Pay Later loans (BNPL) are an increasingly popular way to finance smallticket purchases. We provide new evidence on how BNPL influences regular bank credit markets, benefiting both lenders and borrowers through information production and learning. Using data from over one million...

Aggregate consumption typically exceeds 60 per cent of GDP and should be pivotal in central bank policy models. Most use semi-structural macro-models, yet consumption is usually inadequately specified. We use a systems approach to estimate new equations for South African consumption, house...

According to the Federal Reserve of the United States, in the second quarter of 2024, American credit card debt reached USD 1.14 trillion, the highest balance ever recorded. In an age of high-interest, complex credit cards, how does financial literacy affect credit card debt repayment? Also, how...

Household debt plays a crucial role in influencing the performance of the economy and its vulnerability to shocks. This study synthesises studies on this topic. We used the systematic literature review technique to analyse 97 studies from the EBSCO, Google Scholars, Sabinet African Journals,...

Large-scale debt forbearance is a key policy tool during crises, yet targeting is challenging due to information asymmetries. Using transaction-level data from a Portuguese bank during COVID-19, we find that financially fragile households are more likely to enter forbearance, irrespective of...

The paper analyzes the effects of two kinds of college education subsidies: unconditional tuition discounts and targeted forgiveness of student loans on student college enrollment and completion or dropout decisions. We focus on students’ imperfect knowledge of their academic ability at the...

Divergent trends in income and consumption inequality - with the first increasing substantially more than the latter - are an established, stylized fact for the US economy in the last decades. The same time period also experienced a steady increase in household debt, plausibly not independent...

A recurring question in the mortgage default literature is why underwater default is rare relative to model predictions. We find that one answer is miscalibration of flow payoffs. We build a novel, detailed quantitative model of mortgage default and find that realistic rent dynamics plus mild...

Informal borrowing from family and friends suffers from the lack of formal agreement and can lead to severe consequences. Self-control theory suggest some strategies to improve the saving tendencies which can reduce this type of borrowing. To examining which factors that can enhance these...

Institutional investors increasingly value alternative assets in strategic asset allocation, with private debt emerging as a key asset class. However, its shortage of market history has hindered the development of standardized proxy benchmarks. For that, many institutional investors still do not...

This paper is the first to causally identify the effect of language on attitudes and behaviors toward debt. Using observational data, randomized survey experiments, incentivized borrowing-to-invest decisions, and textual analyses, we show that the moral connotations inherent in debt-related...

Monetary policy impacts consumer spending via the effect of interest rate changes on credit card borrowing. Using supervisory account-level spending and balance data, we estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in the interest rate reduces credit card spending by nearly 9 percent and...

We study the spillover effects of cognitive decline in one member of a coupled household on the financial outcomes of their partner and assess how "own" and spillover effects are moderated by the structure of household financial decision-making. We use a large, nationally representative...