How does gaining access to expensive credit affect the well-being of credit-constrained households? I use plausibly exogenous zip code level variation in the temporal accessibility of payday loans to examine the causal effects of access to payday loans on household well-being. Using suicide...

The dynamic development of the mortgage market, especially in the period before the current financial crisis, revealed that within the EU there are local mortgage credit markets and that it is necessary to harmonize the rules of the system and consumer protection within the Community. The...

To date the debate over payday lending has focused on whether access to such lending is on net beneficial or harmful to consumer welfare. However, payday loans are not one product but many, and different forms of lending may have different welfare implications. The current diversity in payday...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is considering new regulation of payday lending and bank overdraft protection. The Dodd-Frank Act, which established the CFPB, recognizes that consumers benefit from competition among providers of consumer credit products. That law requires the...

Young borrowers are the least experienced financially and, conventionally, thought to be most prone to financial problems. Our results challenge the notion that young borrowers are bad credit card users. We first show that the CARD Act of 2009 succeeded in its aim of reducing young borrowers'...

Usury is a frequent occurrence in consumer credit markets and particularly affects low-income households. Systemic usury exploits poverty by shifting usury into additional products and leveraging usury gains by stringing together individual loan agreements. This paper reviews the economic...

Usury is a frequent occurrence in consumer credit markets and particularly affects low-income households. Although the term usury conjures images of a greedy individual consciously acting to exploit the weak bargaining position of another by deceitful and even fraudulent means, we consider it as...

Usury is a frequent occurrence in consumer credit markets and particularly affects low-income households. Although the term usury conjures images of a greedy individual consciously acting to exploit the weak bargaining position of another by deceitful and even fraudulent means, we consider it as...

We provide evidence of discrimination in auto lending. Combining credit bureau records with borrower characteristics, we find that Black and Hispanic applicants' loan approval rates are 1.5 percentage points lower, even controlling for creditworthiness. In aggregate, discrimination crowds out...

This paper utilizes high-quality transaction data from the largest bank in Denmark to study what drives the demand for high-cost consumption loans. I investigate the extent to which adverse events drive loan demand, or if it is more likely to be explained by borrowers' personality traits. I find...