extended fraud alert in their credit reports affect their risk scores, delinquencies, and other credit bureau variables on … generally positive effects on credit bureau variables, including risk scores. We argue that these positive changes for subprime … consumers are consistent with the effect of increased salience of credit file information to the consumer at the time of the …

This paper uses tradeline-level credit card data to examine initial credit limits and early credit limit increases … before and after the Great Recession and implementation of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act … of 2009 (the CARD Act). I compare two vintages of credit card accounts, those opened in 2005 and 2011; I also follow each …

Fraud alerts — initial fraud alerts, extended fraud alerts, and credit freezes — help protect consumers from the … consequences of identity theft. At the same time, they may impose costs on lenders, credit bureaus, and, in some instances …, consumers. We analyze a unique data set of anonymized credit bureau files to understand how consumers use these alerts. We …

equilibrium in which creditors rely on third-party debt collectors can generate more credit supply and aggregate borrower surplus …

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 …

anonymized credit bureau files, we examine the bankruptcy filing and delinquency rates of private student loan borrowers in …

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 …

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 … that more households than normal fare very poorly). Second, does access to credit smooth aggregate consumption or aggregate …