Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice: Evidence from Commodity Price Shocks

We are grateful for comments from Nick Barberis, Matt Lewis, Erich Muehlegger, Justin Sydnor, and seminar audiences at the NBER, Yale University, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Cornell University, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University. This work was supported by the Centel Foundation/Robert P. Reuss Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and the Brown University Population Studies Center. We thank Eric Chyn, Sarah Johnston, Phillip Ross, and many others for outstanding research assistance. Atif Mian and Amir Sufi generously provided cleaned zipcode-level income data originally obtained from the IRS. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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