Consumers face a choice when evaluating financial contracts: study the fine print and incur a cognitive cost or ignore it and risk costly surprises in future. We use a pair of policy changes in Chile to contrast two measures to protect consumers from fine print: the first improves disclosure and the second standardizes and regulates contract features. With administrative data from the banking regulator on consumer loans, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of these regimes. Consumers offered standardized contracts experi- enced 40% (14.4 percentage points) less delinquency. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that sophisticated borrowers are helped most by increased disclosure, while unsophis- ticated borrowers benefit more from product standardization. Additionally, we show that only sophisticated borrowers—who benefit from the informational disclosure treatment—leave less “money on the table.” We contextualize these results in a stylized model that predicts that fi- nancially sophisticated will benefit from disclosure while unsophisticated borrowers will benefit from standardization based on differentials in the cost of studying.
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