Outputs (24)

Round Number Preferences and Left-Digit Bias: Evidence from Credit Card Repayments (2025)
Journal Article
Sakaguchi, H., Gathergood, J., & Stewart, N. (in press). Round Number Preferences and Left-Digit Bias: Evidence from Credit Card Repayments. Management Science,

We examine round number preferences and left-digit bias in credit card repayments. We show half of all manual credit card payments are at a small set of round-number values, although all values between the statement minimum and balance were permissib... Read More about Round Number Preferences and Left-Digit Bias: Evidence from Credit Card Repayments.

Attention Utility: Evidence from Individual Investors (2024)
Journal Article
Quispe–Torreblanca, E., Gathergood, J., Loewenstein, G., & Stewart, N. (in press). Attention Utility: Evidence from Individual Investors. Review of Economic Studies,

We study attention utility, the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information, which differs from the news utility that arises from gaining new information. The main, field, study examines brokerage account login data t... Read More about Attention Utility: Evidence from Individual Investors.

At the Top of the Mind: Peak Prices and the Disposition Effect (2024)
Journal Article
Quispe-Torreblanca, E., Hume, D., Gathergood, J., Loewenstein, G., & Stewart, N. (in press). At the Top of the Mind: Peak Prices and the Disposition Effect. Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics,

The disposition effect is the reluctance to sell assets at a loss relative to a salient point of reference, typically assumed to be the purchase price. Using data on stocks and housing sales, we show that the peak price achieved by an asset during th... Read More about At the Top of the Mind: Peak Prices and the Disposition Effect.

The Coholding Puzzle: New Evidence from Transaction-Level Data (2024)
Journal Article
Gathergood, J., & Olafsson, A. (2024). The Coholding Puzzle: New Evidence from Transaction-Level Data. Review of Financial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/rfs/hhae016

Why do individuals pay debt interest when they could use their savings to pay down the debt? We explore why individuals “cohold” debt and savings using detailed and highly disaggregated daily-level data on household finances. We find that coholding m... Read More about The Coholding Puzzle: New Evidence from Transaction-Level Data.

Investor Logins and the Disposition Effect (2024)
Journal Article
Quispe-Torreblanca, E., Gathergood, J., Loewenstein, G., & Stewart, N. (2025). Investor Logins and the Disposition Effect. Management Science, 71(1), 219–239. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00359

Using data from an online brokerage, we examine the role of investor logins in trading behavior. We find that a new reference point is created when an investor logs in and views the investor’s portfolio. We observe this as a disposition effect on ret... Read More about Investor Logins and the Disposition Effect.

Does Homeownership Reduce Crime? A Radical Housing Reform from the UK (2023)
Journal Article
Disney, R., Gathergood, J., Machin, S., & Sandi, M. (2023). Does Homeownership Reduce Crime? A Radical Housing Reform from the UK. Economic Journal, 133(655), 2640–2675. https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead040

‘Right to Buy’, a large-scale natural experiment whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy properties at heavily subsidised prices, increased the United Kingdom homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between its 1980 introduction... Read More about Does Homeownership Reduce Crime? A Radical Housing Reform from the UK.

Naïve Buying Diversification and Narrow Framing by Individual Investors (2023)
Journal Article
Gathergood, J., Hirshleifer, D., Leake, D., Sakaguchi, H., & Stewart, N. (2023). Naïve Buying Diversification and Narrow Framing by Individual Investors. Journal of Finance, 78(3), 1705-1741. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13222

We provide the first tests to distinguish whether individual investors equally balance their overall portfolios (naïve portfolio diversification, NPD) or, in contrast, equally balance the values of same-day purchases of multiple assets (naïve buying... Read More about Naïve Buying Diversification and Narrow Framing by Individual Investors.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) …on your credit card (2023)
Journal Article
Guttman-Kenney, B., Firth, C., & Gathergood, J. (2023). Buy now, pay later (BNPL) …on your credit card. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 37, Article 100788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2023.100788

We provide the first economic research on ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL): an unregulated FinTech credit product enabling consumers to defer payments into interest-free instalments. We study BNPL using UK credit card transaction data. We document consume... Read More about Buy now, pay later (BNPL) …on your credit card.

Estimating carbon footprints from large scale financial transaction data (2022)
Journal Article
Trendl, A., Owen, A., Vomfell, L., Kilian, L., Gathergood, J., Stewart, N., & Leake, D. (2023). Estimating carbon footprints from large scale financial transaction data. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 27(1), 56-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13351

Financial transactions are increasingly used by consumer apps and financial service providers to estimate consumption-based carbon emissions. This approach promises a low-resource, ultra-fast, and highly scalable approach to measuring emissions at di... Read More about Estimating carbon footprints from large scale financial transaction data.

Workplace inequality is associated with status-signaling expenditure (2022)
Journal Article
Muggleton, N., Trendl, A., Walasek, L., Leake, D., Gathergood, J., & Stewart, N. (2022). Workplace inequality is associated with status-signaling expenditure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(15), Article e2115196119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115196119

Regional inequality is known to magnify sensitivity to social rank. This, in turn, is shown to increase people’s propensity to acquire luxury goods as a means to elevate their perceived social status. Yet existing research has focused on broad, aggre... Read More about Workplace inequality is associated with status-signaling expenditure.