Although consumer finance is a substantial element of the economy, it has had a smaller footprint within financial economics. In this review, I suggest a functional definition of the subfield of consumer finance, focusing on four key functions: payments, risk management, moving funds from today...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has submitted the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 to Congress for the purpose of overhauling consumer financial regulation. This study has examined the likely effect of the Act on the availability of credit to American consumers. To do so we...

The significant increase in the number of consumer transactions, along with the expansion of information technology, have created massive amounts of detailed information on each individual's credit history. Consumer credit reporting agencies ("CRAs") play an important role in this financial...

We analyze 15.6 million storefront payday loans made to 1.8 million unique borrowers in 2013 to examine payday loan terms and usage. We find that loan prices and loan amounts are generally not at state-mandated maximum levels. For the 30 states in our sample, we find that the number of loans per...

This paper examines to what extent household leverage - as measured by the debt-to-income (DTI) ratio - predicts delinquency in Peru's consumer credit market. A model is estimated to assess the relation between delinquency and the DTI ratio. The initial and current DTI ratios are assessed as...