Academic research and policy discussions of credit markets usually focus on borrowing by firms and producers rather than by households, which are typically analyzed in terms of their savings and portfolio choices. The Economics of Consumer Credit brings together leading international researchers...

Marginal income taxes may have an insurance effect by decreasing the effective fluctuations of after-tax individual income. By compressing the idiosyncratic component o personal income fluctuations, higher marginal taxes should be negatively correlated with the dispersion of consumption across...

Bankruptcy (defaulting on one's debts) acts as insurance if it allows default in cases of negative income shocks. However, if debts are not fully recoverable, lenders may instead react by limiting the amount that they allow households to borrow. This upper borrowing limit will increase as the...

How does the punishment for default affect repayment behavior? We use administrative data, provided by the leading Italian lender of unsecured credit to the household sector, to analyze households repayment behavior. Administrative data are particularly well suited to study what factors are...

We investigate the issue of pervasive credit constraints among US households. There is considerable debate about the incidence of constraints and whether the observed low borrowing in some groups of the population arises from low demand or from denial of credit. Using information on unsecured...

Increasing marginal tax rates and making payments to the poor reduce inequality and introduce savings dis-incentives. Using a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets, we show that higher taxes (and transfers) decrease consumption inequality but also mean savings and mean consumption....

Households are constrained if they want to borrow, but banks restrict their lending. This paper separately identifies (using appropriate exclusion restrictions) the demand for debt, and the maximum amount agents can borrow when it is unknown which consumers are constrained. Using data from the...

Bankruptcy acts as insurance if the decision to default is negatively correlated with income shocks. However, whether bankruptcy provides insurance is dependent on the punishment for default. Such rules can instead cause the consumer to be credit constrained. If debts are not fully enforceable,...

This paper investigates the causes of the Italian consumption decline of the early 1990’s by estimating deviations from normal consumption for 1985-94. The paper uses household data from the Survey of Family Budgets (SFB) from ISTAT, a particularly rich but relatively unexplored source...

Bankruptcy (defaulting on one's debts) acts as insurance if it allows default in cases of negative income shocks. However, if debts are not fully recoverable, lenders may instead react by limiting the amount that they allow households to borrow. This upper borrowing limit will increase as the...