This paper assesses the impact on consumption and debt repayment from a credit card promotional campaign offering cash-back rewards. Using account-level administrative data from a large U.S. financial institution, we employ a generalized difference-in-differences design and find that even with a small 1% cash-back incentive, the rewards program leads to a substantial change in consumer behavior. Cardholders joining the rewards program increase their credit card spending by 32% and their debt by 8%, with such behavior persisting in the long run. Evidence from credit bureau confirms that the higher spending and debt are not driven by cross-card substitution or similar promotions by other card issuers. Different consumer segments respond differentially to the promotional campaign. Consumers with a higher level of liquidity constraints and who are less financially literate demonstrate more pronounced responses.

We investigate the effect of CEO relative age, an early-life measure defined as age relative to others in the same school cohort determined by the cutoff date policy at primary school entry, on corporate risk-taking. We base our analysis on the arguable randomness of managers’ birth months and a novel data set containing the birth month information of 2,595 CEOs from 1,011 Chinese listed firms. We find that firms with “relatively older” CEOs, i.e., those who were older than their classmates at school entry, compared with firms with “relatively younger” CEOs, have greater volatility in their profitability and stock returns, use debt financing more aggressively, engage in more diversifying and value-destroying acquisitions, and experience deteriorating performance. The results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications.