TY  - UNPD
A1  - Assenza, Tiziana
A1  - Cardaci, Alberto
A1  - Chaliasos, Michaēl
T1  - Consumption and account balances in crises: have we neglected cognitive load?
N2  - The complexities of geopolitical events, financial and fiscal crises, and the ebb and flow of personal life circumstances can weigh heavily on individuals’ minds as they make critical economic decisions. To investigate the impact of cognitive load on such decisions, the authors conducted an incentivized online experiment involving a representative sample of 2,000 French households. The results revealed that exposure to a taxing and persistent cognitive load significantly reduced consumption, particularly for individuals under the threat of furlough, while simultaneously increasing their account balances, particularly for those not facing such employment uncertainty. These effects were not driven by supply constraints or a worsening of credit constraints. Instead, cognitive load primarily affected the optimality of the chosen policy rules and impaired the ability of the standard economic model to accurately predict consumption patterns, although this effect was less pronounced among college-educated subjects
T3  - Working paper series / Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability - 197 
KW  - consumption
KW  - saving
KW  - borrowing
KW  - cognitive load
KW  - online experiments
KW  - RCT
KW  - crises
KW  - furlough
Y1  - 2023
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/71228
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-712282
UR  - https://www.imfs-frankfurt.de/forschung/imfs-working-papers/details.html?tx_mmpublications_publicationsdetail%5Bcontroller%5D=Publication&tx_mmpublications_publicationsdetail%5Bpublication%5D=465&cHash=f09e13fd98d7866f60ae7556319ffee9
N1  - JEL-Klassifikation:
G5 Household Finance 
D15 Intertemporal Household Choice - Life Cycle Models and Saving
N1  - We gratefully acknowledge support from the Euro-
pean Savings Institute (OEE) through a research grant.
PB  - Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Univ., Inst. for Monetary and Financial Stability
CY  - Frankfurt am Main
ER  -