Testing the Effectiveness of Consumer Financial Disclosure: Experimental Evidence from Savings Accounts / Paul D. Adams, Stefan Hunt, Christopher Palmer, Redis Zaliauskas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Adams, Paul D.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hunt, Stefan.

Palmer, Christopher J.

Zaliauskas, Redis.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w25718.

NBER working paper series no. w25718

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Testing the Effectiveness of Consumer Financial Disclosure

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

While popular with policymakers, most evidence on consumer financial disclosure's effectiveness studies borrowing decisions (where optimality is unclear) or lab experiments (where attention is not scarce). We provide field evidence from randomized-controlled trials with 124,000 savings-account holders at five UK depositories. Treated consumers were disclosed varying degrees of salient information about alternative products, including one with their current provider strictly dominating their current product. Despite switching taking roughly 15 minutes and the moderate average potential gains ($190/year), switching is rare across disclosure designs and depositors. We find pessimistic beliefs drive disclosure inattention and limit disclosure's effectiveness, helping explain deposit stickiness.

Notes:

Print version record

March 2019.