Using data from multiple card issuers, we show that the most common penalty fee type incurred by credit card holders – late payment fees – declines sharply over the first few months of card life. This phenomenon is wholly due to some consumers adopting automatic payments after a late payment...

Whether through personal experiences or through the experiences of our friends and family, most, if not all, of us are all too familiar with the credit card industry's aggressive attempts to burden young college students with debt that they cannot afford to repay. Many students apply for and use...

We build a framework to understand the effects of regulatory interventions in credit markets, such as caps on interest rates and higher compliance costs for lenders. We focus on the credit card market, in which we observe U.S. consumers borrowing at high and very dispersed interest rates,...

Credit card companies charge an interchange fee for each transaction, and almost half of this fee is returned to consumers in the form of a reward or perk program. Among credit card users who do not use cards for borrowing (convenience users), rewards are a means to negotiate the implicit price...

This research studies the effect of the Credit CARD Act of 2009 on pricing, transparency, and credit availability.This report's findings refute negative claims by the credit card industry that new credit card rules have restricted access to consumer credit and raised its cost.These claims rely...

Credit card offers have grown increasingly complex over time. Using a straightforward measure of complexity — the total number of numeric figures that appear on a credit card direct mail offer's Schumer Box — this research studies changes in card offer complexity. The general structure and...

The aftermath of the financial crisis has seen the formation of several new banking regulators and an onslaught of new financial regulation. In the area of consumer financial protection bureau these regulations have resuscitated the regulatory approach of prior eras, namely substantive...

Forced arbitration clauses have become almost unavoidable in contracts for financial services and products ranging form credit cards to private student loans. This report examines how the financial services industry uses these clauses to defeat consumers' rights and evade accountability for...

This paper analyzes lenders' pricing strategies in the business-to-customer (B2C) unsecured loan market by using a proprietary dataset of approximately 3 million unsecured consumer loans from a B2C online retailer in China. We find that lenders' decisions to invite customers are based on...

As the world-wide financial crisis of 2008 morphs into what many suspect will be a deep and sustained global recession, pundits and policymakers lament the excesses that resulted in the systemically significant overleveraging of the household sector. Not long ago, many of the same people whose...