There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession−a reality that is likely an unintended outcome of the CARD Act of 2009. In regressions that include a rich...

We examine low-to-middle income individuals’ responses to the 2013 payroll tax increase and their 2012 tax refund and find that consumption  declines  90 cents per dollar lost to the tax increase, and  rises  60 cents per additional tax refund dollar.

Focusing on localized measures of bank health and economic activity, and renters as well as homeowners, this paper uses an innovative approach to identifying households likely in need of credit to investigate the effect on household spending of a deterioration in local-bank health. The analysis...