We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Think Forward Initiative, ING Bank; Financial Institutions and Markets Research Center, Avi Nash Fund, and Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research, Northwestern Kellogg; Household Finance Small Grant Program, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NBER; Sparkassenstiftung für Internationale Kooperation; University of Virginia; Fondecyt iniciacion: 11200010; Digital Credit Observatory and Lab for Inclusive Fintech, UC Berkeley; and Consumer Protection Research Initiative, Innovations for Poverty Action. We are very grateful to our discussants Bronson Argyle, Deniz Aydın, Claire Célérier, Ben Charoenwong, Isis Durmeyer, John Grigsby, Chris Hansman, Clément Mazet-Sonilhac, Monica Paiella, Kelly Shue, Guosong Xu, and Constantine Yannelis. We thank seminar participants at AIEA, Bank of Canada, BI Norwegian, Central Bank of Chile, CFPB, Chicago Federal Reserve, CUHK, Emory, Erasmus, FCA, FDIC, HEC Montréal, Houston, ISB, MIT, Northwestern, NYU, Oxford, Peking, Philadelphia Federal Reserve, PUC Chile, UC Berkeley, Universidad de los Andes, Virginia, WashU, and Wayne State, as well as participants at numerous conferences including BEAM, CEPR Household Finance, NBER Summer Institute Household Finance, and Stanford SITE Financial Regulation for helpful comments. We thank Arturo Charleston, Vicente Corral, Andrés Cruz, Matías Fuentes, Jora Li, Nicolas Min, Erick Molina, Limin Peng, Carlos Restituyo, Agustín Valenzuela Pidal, Francisco Villarroel, and Honghao Wang for their excellent research assistance. This RCT was registered in the American Economic Association Registry for randomized control trials under trial number AEARCTR-0008553. We received IRB approval from the NBER (#22_099, #23_154, #24_138), Northwestern University #STU00213001, and Universidad de los Andes #CEC201946. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Sean K. Higgins
Erik Berwart contributed to this research while serving as a Senior Analyst at the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero (CMF), which provided the administrative data used in the paper.
Sheisha Kulkarni received a $5,775 consulting fee from the Financial Conduct Authority in 2026. She was academic reviewer on the preparation of Technical Analysis 1: Data, Analysis of Loss and Liability and Cost Methodologies for the compensation scheme they developed for discretionary commission arrangements in motor finance loans. She reviewed the estimation methodologies that the FCA used in their analysis and commented on their appropriateness and suggested improvements where applicable. This consulting work was not directly related to this project or its results.
No party has the right to review the paper prior to its circulation.
