This paper uses micro data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to generate structural information for the euro area on the incidence of household indebtedness and the debt service burden. It breaks down incidence by characteristics such as income, age and...

The Consumer Fee Study's primary objective is to identify and monetize these costs of bankruptcy access through the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data gathered from court dockets and from professionals working within the bankruptcy system. We began the quantitative section with the...

Examples of financial mistakes made by consumers lend support to the view that systematic mistakes of consumers exist in the EU credit market and that service providers respond strategically to these by redesigning their products. This paper seeks to determine how existing regulation can be...

Much has been written about the state of U.S. consumer credit market. In this Article, we provide an overview of the scholarship in this area and an interim diagnosis of the market failure. We identify the chief problem as various epistemic failures on the consumers' part, which lead to poor...

The original formula established by the EU legislator for the repression of unfair terms (by the use of the criteria for the establishment of the abusive character – the lack of negotiation of the clause, the significant unbalance between the rights and obligations of the parties and the...

So much has been said about the exclusion of contractual terms from the unfairness test embedded in Article 4(2) of the UCT Directive by both the CJEU as well as the legal doctrine. Nonetheless, numerous national courts of different MS struggle with the interpretation and consequently proper...

The paper argues that the competition law approach to EU consumer law should be abolished in favour of an approach that recognizes the vulnerability of consumers on financial markets. The argument is based on three observations. First, freedom of contract is very limited in consumer credit and...

Since 2015 consumer loans have been rising fast in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Credit demand, specifically for consumer durables, has played a crucial role; the easing of supply conditions has been relevant only in Italy and Spain, which experienced stronger credit tightening during the...

This paper applies a life-cycle model with individual income uncertainty to investigate the determinants of credit to households. We show that the value of household credit to GDP ratio depends on (i) the lending-deposit interest rate spread, (ii) individual income uncertainty, (iii) individual...