The high incidence of electricity theft, meter tampering, meter bypassing, reading errors, and defective and aged meters, among others, increases utility losses, especially non-technical losses (NTL). A utility in Ghana piloted a non-technical loss reduction program in 2019 to replace postpaid meters with anti-tamper, anti-fraud, and anti-theft smart prepaid meters. By using customer-level residential billing panel data from 2018 to 2019 obtained from the utility, we assess the effectiveness of this program using the difference-in-differences fixed-effect approach. On average, the results indicated that the reported amount of customers’ monthly electricity consumption increases by 13.2% when any tampered postpaid meter is replaced with a smart prepaid meter, indicating the NTLs by customers. We further employed quantile difference-in-differences regression and observed that reported energy consumption has increased for all households except those at the lower quantile (25th quantile). We conclude that smart prepaid metering could be a remedy to reduce NTLs for the electricity distribution sector in areas where electricity theft is rampant.

This study investigates the relationship between digital financial literacy (DFL) and hyperbolic discounting among 104,993 active securities account holders in Japan. As digital financial services expand rapidly, individuals increasingly require not only traditional financial knowledge but also the capacity to understand digital platforms, evaluate online financial information, and manage emerging technological risks. Using data from the 2025 wave of the Survey on Life and Money, hyperbolic discounting is measured through intertemporal monetary choice scenarios, while DFL is constructed as a multidimensional index encompassing digital knowledge, financial knowledge, service awareness, attitudes, behaviors, practical capability, and protection against digital fraud. Probit regression results reveal a statistically significant negative association between DFL and hyperbolic discounting, indicating that individuals with stronger digital financial competencies are less likely to exhibit hyperbolic discounting. Attitudinal components of DFL exhibit the strongest effects, suggesting that internalized financial beliefs may play a more decisive role than technical knowledge in promoting time-consistent decision-making. Subsample analyses further highlight gender-differentiated patterns in demographic and economic influences on present bias. These findings contribute to behavioral finance by integrating digital capability into intertemporal choice research and provide policy-relevant implications for designing comprehensive financial education and digital literacy initiatives in increasingly digitalized financial environments.

This study builds on the concept of loss tolerance by introducing investment grip, a behavioral interpretation that captures investors’ commitment to long-term objectives under adverse market conditions. While loss tolerance traditionally measures the maximum financial loss an investor can withstand, investment grip focuses on the behavioral and psychological dimensions of maintaining long-term investment objectives when facing short-term setbacks, thus providing a more behaviorally grounded and operationalizable approach for evaluating client risk profiles. The investment grip framework integrates insights from self-control theory, emotional regulation research, and goal-commitment models. Using data from 92,792 Japanese retail investors in the 2025 “Survey on Life and Money,” we examine how gain-framed and loss-framed messages are associated with investment grip, controlling for digital financial literacy and demographic, socioeconomic, and psychological factors. Our findings reveal that loss framing is robustly associated with stronger investment grip, whereas gain framing demonstrates no statistically meaningful effect. These findings offer new insights into Japanese household financial behavior, explaining why conservative savings patterns persist despite the availability of better investment alternatives. The results underscore the role of information framing in shaping household investment behavior, with implications for investor protection and financial communication policy.