IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/rfinst/v32y2019i2p467-495..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

What’s the Catch? Suspicion of Bank Motives and Sluggish Refinancing

Author

Listed:
  • Eric J Johnson
  • Stephan Meier
  • Olivier Toubia

Abstract

Failing to refinance a mortgage can cost a borrower thousands of dollars. Based on administrative data from a large financial institution, we show that around 50% of borrowers leave thousands of dollars on the table by not refinancing. Survey data indicate that, among all the behavioral factors examined, only suspicion of banks’ motives is consistently related to the probability of accepting a refinancing offer. Finally, we report the results of three field experiments showing that enticing offers made by banks fail to increase participation and may even deepen suspicion. Our findings highlight the important role of trust in financial decisions. Received July 12, 2017; editorial decision April 3, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric J Johnson & Stephan Meier & Olivier Toubia, 2019. "What’s the Catch? Suspicion of Bank Motives and Sluggish Refinancing," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(2), pages 467-495.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:32:y:2019:i:2:p:467-495.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhy061
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francisco Gomes & Michael Haliassos & Tarun Ramadorai, 2021. "Household Finance," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 59(3), pages 919-1000, September.
    2. Kubilay, Elif & Raiber, Eva & Spantig, Lisa & Cahlíková, Jana & Kaaria, Lucy, 2023. "Can you spot a scam? Measuring and improving scam identification ability," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 165(C).
    3. McCartney, W. Ben & Shah, Avni M., 2022. "Household mortgage refinancing decisions are neighbor influenced, especially along racial lines," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 128(C).
    4. McGowan, Féidhlim & Papadopoulos, Alexandros & Lunn, Pete, 2023. "Who switches and why? A diagnostic survey of retail financial services in Ireland," Papers WP748, Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI).
    5. Devine, Kenneth, 2022. "Refinancing Inertia in the Irish Mortgage Market," Research Technical Papers 5/RT/22, Central Bank of Ireland.
    6. John Y. Campbell & Nuno Clara & João F. Cocco, 2021. "Structuring Mortgages for Macroeconomic Stability," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(5), pages 2525-2576, October.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:32:y:2019:i:2:p:467-495.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfsssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.