We find that competition from payday lenders leads depository institutions to raise overdraft fees and reduce the availability of “free” checking accounts. We attribute this rise in prices partly to adverse selection created by banks’ practice of charging a flat fee regardless of the...

To sustain growth in an aging economy, it is important to ease the financing of small firms by bank loans. Using bank internal data of small business loans in Germany, we examine the determinants of loan rates in the period 1995-2010. Beyond characteristics of the firm, the loan contract, and...

On December 16th of 2015, the Fed initiated "liftoff," raising the federal funds rate range by 25 basis points and ending a 7-year regime of near-zero rates. We use a unique dataset of 640,000 loan-hour observations to measure the impact of liftoff on interest rates in the peer-to-peer lending...

We use Household Budget Survey data to analyze the evolution of the household credit market in the Czech Republic over the period 2000–2008. We next merge our data with the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions in 2005–2008, in order to test the validity of the standard debt burden...

While theory predicts different effects of household credit and enterprise credit on the economy, the empirical literature has mainly used aggregate measures of overall bank lending to the private sector. We construct a new dataset from 45 developed and developing countries, decomposing bank...

We investigate the effect of house prices on household borrowing using administrative mortgage data from the United Kingdom and a new empirical approach. The data contain household-level information on house prices and borrowing in a panel of homeowners, who refinance at regular and...

Bankruptcy reform in 2005 eliminated debtors' ability to discharge private student loan debt in bankruptcy. This law aimed to reduce costly defaults by diminishing the perceived incentive of some private student loan borrowers to declare bankruptcy even if they had sufficient income to service...

This paper investigates the role of loan contract terms in the performance of consumer credit. Taking advantage of a sample of accepted and rejected consumer loans from a Czech commercial bank, I estimate the elasticity of loan demand and find that borrowers with a high probability of default...

I use peer-to-peer (P2P) credit markets to study how innovations in housing affect households' unsecured credit decisions. Driven by homeowners, I find that a one standard deviation increase in house price growth causes loan origination growth to decrease by 44% of its mean. Conversely, renters...