主题：Mental Accounting for Credit: Evidence from a Large-Scale Credit-Limit Experiment
主讲人：Sean Higgins，西北大学凯洛格商学院副教授
时间：6月10日（周三）上午10:00-11:30
地点：4-101教室
语言：英文
摘要：
Consumer credit finances a growing share of global consumption, yet we know little about how consumers decide how much to borrow and which purchases to finance with debt. We test whether mental accounting, the separation of decisions by how money is categorized, affects borrowing. We conduct an RCT with Cashea, Venezuela's largest consumer credit provider. Cashea provides two distinct credit lines to all of its borrowers: one for groceries/pharmacy, and one for all other retail goods. We randomized 0%, 50%, or 100% increases on one or both credit lines for 210,000 active users. Consistent with our model of mental accounting, we estimate a large category-specific marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of credit line increases of 45% over six months, with limited spillovers across categories. Survey evidence shows effects are not driven by substitution away from cash purchases. Consumers mentally account for credit, with large effects on borrowing and the allocation of spending.
个人简介：
Sean Higgins is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research studies how technology reduces frictions in payments markets and consumer financial markets, and the effects of reducing these frictions on households and small firms in emerging economies. He holds a PhD in Economics, and prior to joining Kellogg, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Associate Editor at the Review of Finance and was named a Poets&Quants Best 40-under-40 MBA Professor.
