The Ostrich in Us: Selective Attention to Financial Accounts, Income, Spending, and Liquidity

Arna Olafsson, Michaela Pagel

Publikation: Working paperForskning

Abstract

A number of theoretical research papers in micro as well as macroeconomics model and analyze attention but direct empirical evidence remains scarce. This paper investigates the determinants of attention to financial accounts using panel data from a financial management software provider containing daily logins, discretionary spending, income, balances, and credit limits. We find that individuals are considerably more likely to log in because they get paid utilizing exogenous variation in paydays due to weekends and holidays. Beyond looking at the causal effect of income on attention, we examine how attention depends on individual spending, balances, and credit limits within individuals’ own histories. We find that attention is decreasing in spending and overdrafts and increasing in cash holdings, savings, and liquidity. Moreover, attention jumps discretely when balances change from negative to positive. We argue that our findings cannot be explained by rational theories of inattention. Instead our findings are consistent with Ostrich effects and anticipatory utility as the main motivation for paying attention to financial accounts and thus provide new tests for information- or belief-dependent utility models. Furthermore, we show that some of our findings can be explained by a recent influential one of those models (Kőszegi and Rabin, 2009), which assumes individuals experience utility over news or changes in expectations about consumption.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
UdgivelsesstedCambridge, MA
UdgiverNational Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Antal sider46
DOI
StatusUdgivet - okt. 2017
NavnNational Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper Series
Nummer23945
ISSN0898-2937
NavnCentre for Economic Policy Research. Discussion Papers
Nummer12259
ISSN0265-8003

Citationsformater