Selected Working Papers

• Terrorist Attacks and Strategic Household Consumption. with Sumit Agarwal, Pulak Ghosh, and Weiqiang Tan (SSRN)

    Linking individual-level financial activities data to local terrorist attack events, we document a shift of consumption from debit accounts to credit cards: the attack-hit consumers increase the weekly share of credit card spending by 28 basis points compared to the non-attack-hit consumers during the five weeks following the attacks.   

• AsiaFA; Sun Yat-sen University; Macau University

• South China Morning Post

• Liquidity Constraint Threat and Household Indebtedness. with Sumit Agarwal and Wenlan Qian (SSRN) 

    Using individual-level credit card data from a Singapore financial institution, we find a threat of suspending all existing unsecured credit induces the credit card revolvers to reduce their monthly credit card balance by 211 SGD (or 10.2%) more after the policy announcement relative to non-revolvers. A 188 SGD (or 9.9%) decrease in credit card debt makes a major contribution to the credit card balance reduction, and a 20 SGD (or 24%) decrease in credit card spending makes a minor contribution. 

• AsiaFA; CRRI&CIRF(s)

• Human Performance at Solving 0-1 Knapsack Problems: Results from a Large-scale Field Experiment. with Sumit Agarwal, Wenlan Qian, and Joel Goh, revise & resubmit

    Based on a large-scale randomized controlled field experiment on a mobile gaming platform's global playerbase, we discover that human players perform better on problems rated as more difficult by traditional measures of knapsack difficulty, whereas perform worse on problem instances with larger optamality gaps. Our findings suggest that optamility gaps can serve as a promising measure of human-perceived knapsack difficulty.