Control thyself: Self-control failure and household wealth

We examine the relationship between self-control and household wealth. Building on literature in psychology, we take a more comprehensive approach to the concept of self-control and posit that it consists of three ingredients: planning, monitoring, and commitment to pre-set goals. We build a measure which combines those three components and can be computed using a standard representative survey. We find that self-control failure is strongly associated with different household net wealth measures and with self-assessed financial distress.