Topic 66 : Household Debt and Savings
-
Perceived Precautionary Savings Motives: Evidence from FinTech
-
Medicaidand Household Savings Behavior: New Evidence from Tax Refunds
-
Reducing Barriers to Enrollment in Federal Student Loan Repayment Plans: Evidence fromthe Navient Field Experiment
1、Perceived Precautionary Savings Motives: Evidence from FinTech
Working paper
,
issued in January 2019
Francesco D'Acunto,
Boston College
Thomas Rauter,
University of Chicago
Christoph Scheuch,
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Michael Weber,
University of Chicago
We study the consumption response to the introduction of a mobile overdraft facility
on a FinTech app. Users react to the availability of the overdraft by increasing their consumption spending permanently and reallocating consumption from non-discretionary to
discretionary goods and services. For identification, we exploit sharp discontinuities in
the size of the overdraft limit based on an income rounding rule the app uses to assign
credit limits. In the cross section, we find similar responses for young and old users,
users with high and low income volatility, and users with steep and flat income paths.
The most liquid users—those with high ratios of deposits to income inflows—drive the
consumption spending response. These results are not fully consistent with models of
financial constraints, buffer stock models with and without durables, present-bias preferences, or the canonical life-cycle permanent income model. We discuss a new channel, the
perceived precautionary savings channel, which appears consistent with all our results.
Under this channel, households with higher liquid wealth behave as if they faced strong
precautionary savings motives even though no observables suggests they should do so.
原文链接：
https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=AFA2020&paper_id=299
2、
Medicaid and Household Savings Behavior: New Evidence from Tax Refunds
Working paper
,
issued in March 2019
Emily Gallagher,
University of Colorado, Boulder
Radhakrishnan Gopalan,
Washington University in St. Louis
Michal Grinstein-Weiss,
Washington University in St. Louis
Jorge Sabat,
Washington University in St Louis
Using data on over 57,000 low-income tax filers, we estimate the effect of Medicaid access
on the propensity of households to save or repay debt from their tax refunds. We instrument
for Medicaid access using variation in state eligibility rules. We find substantial heterogeneity
across households in the savings response to Medicaid. Households that are not experiencing
financial hardship behave in a manner consistent with a precautionary savings model, meaning
they save less under Medicaid. In contrast, among households experiencing financial hardship,
Medicaid eligibility increases refund savings rates by roughly 5 percentage points or $102. For
both sets of households, effects are stronger in states with lower bankruptcy exemption limits
– consistent with uninsured, financially constrained households using bankruptcy to manage
health expenditure risk. Our results imply that expansions to the social safety net may affect
the magnitude of the consumption response to tax rebates.
原文链接：
https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=AFA2020&paper_id=530
3、
Reducing Barriers to Enrollment in Federal Student Loan Repayment Plans: Evidence fromthe Navient Field Experiment
Working paper
,
issued in March 2019
HolgerMueller,
New York University
Constantine Yannelis,
University of Chicago
