This paper describes the U.S. financial system’s response to the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and examines how financial safety nets helped meet consumers’ needs in the aftermath of the storm. Overall, we find that consumers who hold deposit accounts at financial institutions are...

This paper describes the characteristics of closed-system and open-system prepaid cards. Of particular interest is a class of open-system programs that offer a set of features similar to conventional deposit accounts using card-based payment applications. The benefits that open-system prepaid...

Analyzing cross-sectional data from the National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES), we find that the predicted probability of private insurance coverage for low-income individuals as a group fell dramatically from 1977 to 1987. The results of a decompositional technique show that the...

This article asks two basic questions. First, is homeownership more or less likely for Hispanics who choose to reside in an ethnic location; and second, is the location decision jointly or endogenously made with the homeownership decision? The findings suggest that, indeed, the location and...

This paper describes the U.S. financial system's response to the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and examines how financial safety nets helped meet consumers' needs in the aftermath of the storm. Overall, we find that consumers who hold deposit accounts at financial institutions are less...

The roughly 9.5 percent of all U.S. families that are without some type of transaction account (unbanked) are disproportionately represented by minorities. The unbanked often must rely on alternative ways to carry out basic financial transactions such as cashing payroll checks and paying bills....