To explain persistence of credit card interest rates at relatively high levels, Calem and Mester (AER, 1995) argued that informational barriers create switching costs for high-balance customers. As evidence, using data from the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances, they showed that these households...

Depository institutions may use information advantages along dimensions not observed or considered by outside parties to "cream-skim," meaning to transfer risk to naive, uninformed, or unconcerned investors through the sale or securitization process. This paper examines whether "cream-skimming"...

The authors empirically study how the underlying riskiness of the pool of home equity line of credit originations is affected over the credit cycle. Drawing from the largest existing database of U.S. home equity lines of credit, they use county-level aggregates of these loans to estimate panel...