Household access to financial products is often conditioned on previous use. However, banning access when learning is possible may be discriminatory or counterproductive. The 'experiment' of German reunification (exogenously) offered to East Germans unconditional access to (exogenously)...

We examine how consumer credit access impacts self-employment and small business ownership by building a new dataset that links 3 million individual earnings and credit reports to pass-through tax records. We show that self-employment and employer business ownership increase with personal credit...

We document the cyclical properties of unsecured consumer credit (procyclical and volatile) and of consumer bankruptcies (countercyclical and very volatile). Using a growth model with household heterogeneity in earnings and assets with access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and...

This paper finds that stricter laws regulating third-party debt collection reduce the number of third-party debt collectors, lower the recovery rates on delinquent credit card loans, and lead to a modest decrease in the openings of new revolving lines of credit. Further, stricter third-party...