We document the cyclical properties of unsecured consumer credit (procyclical and volatile) and of consumer bankruptcies (countercyclical and very volatile). Using a growth model with household heterogeneity in earnings and assets with access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and...

Although credit history scoring offers benefits to lenders and borrowers, failure to consider situational circumstances raises important statistical issues that may affect the ability of scoring systems to accurately quantify an individual's credit risk. Evidence from a national sample of credit...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

Although credit history scoring offers benefits to lenders and borrowers, failure to consider situational circumstances raises important statistical issues that may affect the ability of scoring systems to accurately quantify an individual's credit risk. Evidence from a national sample of credit...