Household surveys are the source of some of the most widely studied data on consumer balance sheets, with the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) generally cited as the leading source of wealth data for the United States. At the same time, recent research questions survey respondents' propensity...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel, this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly....

Why do negative credit events lead to long-term borrowing constraints? Exploiting banking regulations in Peru and utilizing currency movements, we show that consumers who face a credit rating downgrade due to bad luck experience a three-year reduction in financing. Consumers respond to the shock...

This paper questions several longstanding descriptions of consumer bankruptcy in the United States. We focus on Chapter 13, which discharges debts after consumers pay disposable income to creditors for up to five years. Many studies document pathologies, including high failure rates, racial...

Based on a unique dataset provided by a retail bank, we analyze borrower heterogeneity in the debt response to interest rate decreases and credit limit increases in revolving consumer credit. Our key findings show that 1) the debt response of borrowers who commit to monthly minimum repayments is...

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...

This paper analyzes why consumers use relatively expensive short-term credit. Consumers are heterogeneous in their susceptibility to short-term credit use. Specifically, I find that consumers with low financial literacy and consumers who do not think twice about their decisions use overdraft...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the...