Consumer bankruptcies rose sharply over the last 20 years in the U.S. economy. During the same period, there was impressive technological progress in the information sector (the IT revolution). At the same time, pricing of unsecured debt changed dramatically. The dispersion of interest rates...

Recent technological innovation in credit markets has made it easier for households to access information about their cost of credit. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment in an online consumer credit market to identify which households take advantage of informative markets. In the setting...

Information asymmetries are known in theory to lead to inefficiently low credit provision, yet empirical estimates of the resulting welfare losses are scarce. This paper leverages a randomized experiment conducted by a large fintech lender to estimate welfare losses arising from asymmetric...

This paper tests for incentive and selection effects in a subprime consumer credit market. We estimate the incentive effect of loan size on default using sharp discontinuities in loan eligibility rules. This allows us to estimate the magnitude of selection from the cross-sectional correlation...

The information technology (IT) revolution coincided with the transformation of the U.S. unsecured credit market. From 1983 to 2004 households’ unsecured borrowing increased rapidly and there was a even faster increase in the number of bankruptcy filings. To study the effect of information...

This paper tests for incentive and selection effects in a subprime consumer credit market. We estimate the incentive effect of loan size on default using sharp discontinuities in loan eligibility rules. This allows us to estimate the magnitude of selection from the cross-sectional correlation...