Record Details

Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GRRSC7
 
Creator Seira, Enrique
Elizondo, Alan
Laguna-Müggenburg, Eduardo
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, even though there is little evidence of its effectiveness. We implement a randomized control trial in the credit card market for a large population of indebted cardholders and measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act-type disclosures, de-biasing warning messages and social comparison information on default, indebtedness, account closings, and credit scores. We conduct extensive external validity exercises in several banks, with different disclosures, and with actual policy mandates. We find that providing salient interest rate disclosures had no effects, while comparisons and de-biasing messages had only modest effects at best.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Parrado, Andres