IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28956.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Saving Cause Borrowing?

Author

Listed:
  • Paolina C. Medina
  • Michaela Pagel

Abstract

We analyze an experiment involving 3.1 million bank customers who were encouraged to save through SMS messages. We first theoretically show that by examining their spending, saving, and borrowing responses we can distinguish between the leading explanations for coholding liquid savings and credit card debt. Using a machine learning algorithm, we then predict individual-level treatment effects and find that the most responsive individuals reduce spending and increase their savings by 5.1% (225 USD PPP per month), while their credit card debt remains unchanged. We argue that these joint findings suggest people co-hold because they mentally separate savings and debt accounts

Suggested Citation

  • Paolina C. Medina & Michaela Pagel, 2021. "Does Saving Cause Borrowing?," NBER Working Papers 28956, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28956
    Note: EFG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w28956.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dutt, Satyajit & Radermacher, Jan W., 2023. "Age, wealth, and the MPC in Europe: A supervised machine learning approach," SAFE Working Paper Series 383, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28956. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.