Credit card lenders have been writing off loans at sharply higher rates since 1995, suggesting that riskier borrowers are acquiring credit cards. What makes the new borrowers riskier - even more than their personal characteristics and attitudes toward debt - is the fact that they carry higher...

Charge-offs on credit card loans are rising sharply. While many analysts blame this trend on an expanding supply of credit cards, a closer look reveals the importance of two demand factors - wealth and the share of the population at peak borrowing age - in explaining the increase in bad debt

Thousands of U.S. households filed for bankruptcy just before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005. That rush-to-file was more pronounced, we find, in states with more generous bankruptcy exemptions and lower credit scores. We take that finding as evidence that the new law effectively reduces...

The pattern of disagreement between bond raters suggests that bank and insurance firms are inherently more opaque than other firms. Moody's and Standard and Poor's split more frequently over these financial intermediaries, and the splits are more lopsided, as theory here predicts. Uncertainty...

Evidence in this paper suggests that a close banking relationship a loan commitment in particular relaxes cash flow and cash management constraints on firms. Given firms' prospects (Q), the investment and cash flow correlation is substantially lower when firms have a bank loan commitment. The...

We investigate how bank migration across state lines over the last quarter century has affected the size and covariance of business fluctuations within states. Starting with a two-state version of the unit banking model in Holmstrom and Tirole(1997), we conclude that the theoretical affect of...

As the banking business grows more complex, government supervisors of banks seem increasingly willing to share the role of policing bank risk with private investors, especially bondholders. This paper investigates the disciplinary role of markets using bond spreads, ratings, and bank portfolio...

Savers with uncertain life spans cannot stick to long-term investment plans when they invest directly in liquid assets. Before horizons are known, all savers will plan to roll over their short-term assets if returns turn out high. Ex post, the short-term investors will consume their liquid...

The naming of eleven banks as quot;too big to fail (TBTF)quot; in 1984 led bond raters to raise their ratings on new bond issues of TBTF banks about a notch relative to those of other, unnamed banks. The relationship between bond spreads and ratings for the TBTF banks tended to flatten after...