Practically all industrialized economies restrict the length of time that credit bureaus can retain borrowers’ negative … credit information. There is, however, a large variation in the permitted retention times across countries. By exploiting a … earlier from credit files. We find that the loss of information led banks to tighten their lending standards significantly as …

In the data, most consumer defaults on unsecured credit are informal and the lending industry devotes significant … resources to debt collection. We develop a new theory of credit card lending that takes these two features into account. The two …. We show that the model gives rise to a novel channel through which IT progress can affect outcomes in the credit markets …

statistics regarding bankruptcy and unsecured credit while matching key macroeconomic aggregates and the earnings and wealth …

bankruptcy risk discouraging households from using credit. This finding contradicts the intuition that access to credit helps …We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard … theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and …

This paper describes the Federal Reserve System’s monthly estimate of revolving consumer credit as published in the G … relies. In addition, it proposes a framework for analyzing the revolving credit statistic and suggests modifications to how … the estimate is calculated and presented. The paper concludes that the revolving credit estimate is highly accurate and …