Are Information Disclosures Effective? Evidence from the Credit Card Market

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.

以信息披露为手段的金融市场消费者保护工作始终是各国政府议程中的重点议题，尽管目前鲜有实证证据能够证实其实施有效性。我们针对大规模负债信用卡持卡人群体，在信用卡市场开展了一项随机对照试验（randomized control trial），以评估《诚实借贷法》（Truth-in-Lending-Act）式信息披露、去偏警示信息以及社会比较信息对持卡人违约行为、负债水平、账户销户行为与信用评分的影响。我们联合多家银行，采用差异化信息披露方案，并结合实际政策强制要求，开展了多维度的外部有效性验证实验。研究结果显示，仅突出展示利率信息的披露方式未产生任何显著效果，而社会比较信息与去偏警示信息至多仅能带来微弱的影响。