The U.S. credit card market is highly concentrated and highly profitable, two facts which have drawn scrutiny of its competitive practices. I study competition in this market by analyzing how lenders target and acquire new customers using direct-mail, their principal acquisition channel. I find...

This paper establishes how the classical facts characterizing a failure of competition in credit card lending during the 1980s are largely reversed in the decades following. Between 1990 and 2008 lenders' mark-ups decreased by 35 percent, profits shrank by 32 percent relative the average in...