DEBT | Eliciting Preferences over Saving and Borrowing

Summary
Attitudes towards saving and borrowing are crucial to the understanding of individual financial behavior. An unwillingness to save or borrow can have severe economic implications, such as preventing optimal portfolio choice, insufficient retirement saving, or a failure to invest in profitable investment projects. To further the understanding of borrowing and saving behavior, I am proposing to develop an experimental protocol that allows to measure individual preferences over saving and borrowing. In particular, I will develop an intertemporal choice list, in which subjects can choose between different saving and debt contracts, using real monetary incentives. Subject’s decisions in this choice experiment can be used to infer individual differences in preferences over saving and borrowing. To control for confounds, and to identify how preferences over borrowing and saving interact with preferences over risk, time and losses, I will also elicit these preferences experimentally, and estimate all domains of preference jointly. For this purpose, I will write a formal model that extends cumulative prospect theory, to incorporate preferences over saving and borrowing. Along with the experiment, I plan to elicit a number of different novel survey measures regarding participants’ borrowing behavior and experience, and identify those that best predict behavior in the incentivized choice experiments. Identifying simple survey measures that explain preferences over saving and borrowing will be of help for future research on these preferences, where time and monetary constraints do not allow a fully incentivized experiment.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/795958
Start date: 01-09-2018
End date: 31-08-2020
Total budget - Public funding: 165 598,80 Euro - 165 598,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Attitudes towards saving and borrowing are crucial to the understanding of individual financial behavior. An unwillingness to save or borrow can have severe economic implications, such as preventing optimal portfolio choice, insufficient retirement saving, or a failure to invest in profitable investment projects. To further the understanding of borrowing and saving behavior, I am proposing to develop an experimental protocol that allows to measure individual preferences over saving and borrowing. In particular, I will develop an intertemporal choice list, in which subjects can choose between different saving and debt contracts, using real monetary incentives. Subject’s decisions in this choice experiment can be used to infer individual differences in preferences over saving and borrowing. To control for confounds, and to identify how preferences over borrowing and saving interact with preferences over risk, time and losses, I will also elicit these preferences experimentally, and estimate all domains of preference jointly. For this purpose, I will write a formal model that extends cumulative prospect theory, to incorporate preferences over saving and borrowing. Along with the experiment, I plan to elicit a number of different novel survey measures regarding participants’ borrowing behavior and experience, and identify those that best predict behavior in the incentivized choice experiments. Identifying simple survey measures that explain preferences over saving and borrowing will be of help for future research on these preferences, where time and monetary constraints do not allow a fully incentivized experiment.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2017

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2017
MSCA-IF-2017