There is little evidence on how the large market for credit score improvement products affects consumers or credit … market efficiency. A randomized encouragement design on a standard credit builder loan (CBL) identifies null average effects … on whether consumers have a credit score and the score itself, with important heterogeneity: those with loans outstanding …

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 …

-constrained households initially use more than 70% of the extra liquidity generated by mortgage rate reductions to repay credit card debt-- a … during the housing crisis. We use proprietary loan-level panel data matched to consumer credit records using borrowers … relative terms, and an overall improvement in household credit standing. New financing of durable consumption by borrowers with …

the minimum from 36.9% to 9.6%. However, the nudge does not reduce credit card debt after seven payment cycles. Nudged … anchoring of credit card payments to the minimum payment. In our field experiment, the nudge reduces enrollment in Autopaying …

Information asymmetries are known in theory to lead to inefficiently low credit provision, yet empirical estimates of … to estimate welfare losses arising from asymmetric information in the market for online consumer credit. Building on … price distortions, we find only small overall welfare losses, particularly for high-credit-score borrowers …

Digital credit has expanded rapidly in Africa, mostly in the form of short-term, high-interest loans offered via mobile …

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the UK and a … new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and borrowing in a panel of … Great Recession. We present two main results. First, there is a clear and robust effect of house prices on borrowing, but …

In this paper, we examine high-cost methods of borrowing in the United States, such as payday loans, pawn shops, auto … these methods in the past five years. Moreover, many young adults engage in high-cost borrowing: 34 percent of young … who are more financially literate are much less likely to have engaged in high-cost borrowing. Our empirical work shows …