Payday loans are widely condemned as a “predatory debt trap.” We test that claim by researching how households in … about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection at a higher rate. North Carolina households …—contradicts the debt trap critique of payday lending, but is consistent with the hypothesis that payday credit is preferable to …

financial market segmentation. If we enrich the set of observables with a measure of long-term debt, the semi-elasticity of the … risk premium to the amount of debt in private-sector hands is substantially smaller than that reported in the recent …

and debt in funding such assets. In contrast, the balance sheet management of financial intermediaries reveals that it is …-based financial intermediaries such as the Wall Street investment banks, as well as the commercial bank subsidiaries of the large U …

research questions survey respondents’ propensity and ability to report debt characteristics accurately. We compare household … debt as reported by borrowers to the SCF with household debt as reported by lenders to Equifax using the new FRBNY Consumer … Credit Panel (CCP). Moments of the borrower and lender debt distributions are compared by year, age of household head …