Professor JOHN GATHERGOOD's Outputs (28)

Early Behavioral Markers of Loss of Financial Capacity (2025)
Journal Article
Trendl, A., Anwyl-Irvine, A., Vomfell, L., Abbey, E., Stewart, N., Atkins, D., Llewellyn, D. J., Gathergood, J., & Leake, D. (in press). Early Behavioral Markers of Loss of Financial Capacity. JAMA Network Open, 8(6), Article e2515894. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.15894

Importance
Many conditions, including neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric disorders, can impair financial decision-making in older age. Although banking data offer rich insights, they have not yet been leveraged to understand how the loss o... Read More about Early Behavioral Markers of Loss of Financial Capacity.

Attention Utility: Evidence from Individual Investors (2025)
Journal Article
Quispe–Torreblanca, E., Gathergood, J., Loewenstein, G., & Stewart, N. (2025). Attention Utility: Evidence from Individual Investors. Review of Economic Studies, Article rdaf028. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdaf028

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.

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.

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.

Work-from-home and the risk of securities misconduct (2023)
Journal Article
Cumming, D., Firth, C., Gathergood, J., & Stewart, N. (2023). Work-from-home and the risk of securities misconduct. European Financial Management, 29(4), 1054-1077. https://doi.org/10.1111/eufm.12426

In the wake of the global pandemic, a challenge for CEOs and boards is to set a stakeholder-acceptable organizational balance between remote and traditional office working. However, the risks of work-from-home are not yet fully understood. We describ... Read More about Work-from-home and the risk of securities misconduct.

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.

Default Effects of Credit Card Minimum Payments (2021)
Journal Article
Sakaguchi, H., Stewart, N., Gathergood, J., Adams, P., Guttman-Kenney, B., Hayes, L., & Hunt, S. (2022). Default Effects of Credit Card Minimum Payments. Journal of Marketing Research, 59(4), 775-796. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211070589

Credit card minimum payments are designed to ensure that individuals pay down their debt over time, and scheduling minimum automatic repayments helps to avoid forgetting to repay. Yet minimum payments have additional, unintended psychological default... Read More about Default Effects of Credit Card Minimum Payments.

The association between gambling and financial, social and health outcomes in big financial data (2021)
Journal Article
Muggleton, N., Parpart, P., Newall, P., Leake, D., Gathergood, J., & Stewart, N. (2021). The association between gambling and financial, social and health outcomes in big financial data. Nature Human Behaviour, 5, 319-326. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-01045-w

Gambling is an ordinary pastime for some people, but is associated with addiction and harmful outcomes for others. Evidence of these harms is limited to small sample, crosssectional self-reports, such as prevalence surveys. We examine the association... Read More about The association between gambling and financial, social and health outcomes in big financial data.

How Do Consumers Avoid Penalty Fees? Evidence from Credit Cards (2020)
Journal Article
Gathergood, J., Sakaguchi, H., Stewart, N., & Weber, J. (2021). How Do Consumers Avoid Penalty Fees? Evidence from Credit Cards. Management Science, 67(4), 2562-2578. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3568

Using data from multiple card issuers, we show that the most common penalty fee type incurred by credit card holders-late payment fees-declines sharply over the first few months of card life. This phenomenon is wholly due to some consumers adopting a... Read More about How Do Consumers Avoid Penalty Fees? Evidence from Credit Cards.

Academic Salaries and Public Evaluation of University Research: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework (2019)
Journal Article
De Fraja, G., Facchini, G., & Gathergood, J. (2019). Academic Salaries and Public Evaluation of University Research: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework. Economic Policy, 34(99), 523-583. https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eiz009

We study the effects of public evaluation of university research on the pay structures of academic departments. A simple equilibrium model of university pay determination shows how the pay-performance relationship can be explained by the incentives i... Read More about Academic Salaries and Public Evaluation of University Research: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework.

How do Americans repay their debt?: the balance-matching heuristic (2019)
Journal Article
Gathergood, J., Mahoney, N., Stewart, N., & Weber, J. (2019). How do Americans repay their debt?: the balance-matching heuristic. Economics Bulletin, 39(2), 1458-1466

In Gathergood et al. (forthcoming), we studied credit card repayments using linked data on multiple cards from the United Kingdom. We showed that individuals did not allocate payments to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of... Read More about How do Americans repay their debt?: the balance-matching heuristic.

The Red, the Black, and the Plastic: Paying Down Credit Card Debt for Hotels, Not Sofas (2019)
Journal Article
Quispe-Torreblanca, E. G., Quispe-Torreblanca, E., Stewart, N., Gathergood, J., & Loewenstein, G. (2019). The Red, the Black, and the Plastic: Paying Down Credit Card Debt for Hotels, Not Sofas. Management Science, 65(11), 5392-5410. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3195

Using transaction data from a sample of 1.8 million credit card accounts, we provide the first field test of a major prediction of Prelec and Loewenstein’s (1998) theory of mental accounting: that consumers will pay off expenditure on transient form... Read More about The Red, the Black, and the Plastic: Paying Down Credit Card Debt for Hotels, Not Sofas.

Consumption changes, not income changes, predict changes in subjective well-being (2019)
Journal Article
Brown, G. D. A., & Gathergood, J. (2019). Consumption changes, not income changes, predict changes in subjective well-being. Social Psychological and Personality Science, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619835215

Does happiness depend on what one earns or what one spends? Income is typically found to have small beneficial effects on well-being. However, economic theory suggests that well-being is conferred not by income but by consumption (i.e., spending on g... Read More about Consumption changes, not income changes, predict changes in subjective well-being.

How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic (2019)
Journal Article
Gathergood, J., Mahoney, N., Stewart, N., & Weber, J. (2019). How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic. American Economic Review, 109(3), 844-875. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180288

We study how individuals repay their debt using linked data on multiple credit cards. Repayments are not allocated to the higher interest rate card, which would minimize the cost of borrowing. Moreover, the degree of misallocation is invariant to the... Read More about How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic.