TY  - BOOK
AU  - Gelman,Michael
AU  - Roussanov,Nikolai
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Managing Mental Accounts: Payment Cards and Consumption Expenditures 
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2023///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
KW  - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
KW  - jelc
KW  - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
KW  - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
KW  - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
KW  - Other
KW  - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
KW  - General
KW  - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making in Financial Markets
KW  - Household Finance
KW  - Household Saving, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
KW  - Financial Literacy
N1  - August 2023; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Does mental accounting matter for total consumption expenditures? We exploit a unique setting in which individuals exogenously received a new credit card, without requesting one. Using random variation in the time of receipt we show that individuals temporarily increase total consumption expenditure by making purchases with the new card without reducing spending on the others. We do not observe a corresponding increase in indebtedness. Total consumption expenditure rises even for the least liquidity-constrained individuals. The evidence is consistent with consumers treating methods of payment as nonfungible budget categories, as suggested by models of mental accounting and narrow bracketing
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w31613
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w31613
ER  -