When households increase their deposits in formal bank savings accounts, what is the source of the money? We combine … high-frequency surveys with an experiment in which a Sri Lankan bank used mobile Point-of-Service (POS) terminals to …

This paper studies the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on consumer credit markets. Exploiting heterogeneity in UI … decline in default risk by expanding credit access and reducing interest rates for low-income households at risk of being laid … losses from loan default and expanding access to credit. …

We document cross-individual variation in U.S. credit card borrowing costs (APRs) that is large enough to explain … explain APR differences comparable to moving someone from the worst credit score decile to the best. …

We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using … individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that … typically confound analyses of the collateral channel. We find that a $30,000 increase in credit availability led to a 12 basis …

-income households increased their demand for credit to finance higher consumption expenditures in order to "keep up" with higher … the underlying type of the applicant, so that banks ultimately channel more credit toward lower-income applicants in low …

We analyze the effectiveness of consumer financial regulation by considering the 2009 Credit Card Accountability … data set covering over 160 million credit card accounts, we find that regulatory limits on credit card fees reduced overall … of an offsetting increase in interest charges or a reduction in volume of credit, although we are unable to analyze …

The intersection of research and policy on consumer credit often has a Goldilocks feel. Some researchers and … policymakers posit that consumer credit markets produce too much credit. Other researchers and policymakers posit that markets … produce too little credit. I review theories and evidence on inefficient consumer credit supply. For each of eight classes of …