Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market
通过大规模随机对照试验，检验了信用卡市场中利率披露、去偏警告和社会比较信息对违约、负债、销户和信用评分的影响，发现披露效果有限。
Consumer protection in financial markets in the form of information disclosure is high on government agendas, even though there is little evidence of its effectiveness. We implement a randomized control trial in the credit card market for a large population of indebted cardholders and measure the impact of Truth-in-Lending-Act-type disclosures, de-biasing warning messages and social comparison information on default, indebtedness, account closings, and credit scores. We conduct extensive external validity exercises in several banks, with different disclosures, and with actual policy mandates. We find that providing salient interest rate disclosures had no effects, while comparisons and de-biasing messages had only modest effects at best.