Following the 2008 financial crisis, mortgage credit tightened and banks lost significant mortgage market share to nonbank lenders, including to fintech firms recently. Have fintech firms expanded credit access, or are their customers similar to those of traditional lenders? Unlike in small...

The authors provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers' account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance...

This study examines key default determinants of fintech loans, using loan-level data from the LendingClub consumer platform during 2007–2018. We identify a robust set of contractual loan characteristics, borrower characteristics, and macroeconomic variables that are important in determining...

We explore the role of consumer risk appetite in the initiation of credit cycles and as an early trigger of the U.S. mortgage crisis. We analyze a panel data set of mortgages originated between the years 2000 and 2009 and follow their performance up to 2014. After controlling for all the usual...

The Great Recession offers a unique opportunity to analyze the performance of credit risk models under conditions of economic stress. We focus on the performance of models of credit risk applied to risk-segmented credit card portfolios. Specifically, we focus on models of default and loss and...

For many reasons, payment systems are subject to strong network effects; one of those is the necessity of interoperability among participants. This is often accomplished via standard-setting organizations. The goal of the Single European Payments Area (SEPA) is to establish modern cross-boarder...

The activities of third-party debt collectors affect millions of borrowers. However, relatively little is known about their impact on consumer credit. To study this issue, I investigate whether state debt collection laws affect the ability of third-party debt collectors to recover delinquent...

We study the house price recovery in the U.S. single-family residential housing market since the outbreak of the mortgage crisis, which, in contrast to the preceding housing boom, was not accompanied by a rise in homeownership rates. Using comprehensive property-level transaction data, we show...

This paper finds that stricter laws regulating third-party debt collection reduce the number of third-party debt collectors, lower the recovery rates on delinquent credit card loans, and lead to a modest decrease in the openings of new revolving lines of credit. Further, stricter third-party...

We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending such as credit cards. Our model stresses...