Much has been written about the state of U.S. consumer credit market. In this Article, we provide an overview of the scholarship in this area and an interim diagnosis of the market failure. We identify the chief problem as various epistemic failures on the consumers' part, which lead to poor...

The intersection of research and policy on consumer credit often has a Goldilocks feel. Some researchers and policymakers posit that consumer credit markets produce too much credit. Other researchers and policymakers posit that markets produce too little credit. I review theories and evidence on...

Credit purchases of consumer goods are commonly made upon terms governed by an agreement between the lender and the seller. This type of purchase is generally subject to a legal principle of joint responsibility under which the lender and the seller are jointly liable to the consumer for breach...

Since 1 June 2003 the file of the Central Office for Credits to Private Individuals has recorded information relating to all consumer credits and mortgage loans contracted by natural persons for private purposes, as well as any payment defaults resulting from these loans. This registration aims...

The interaction between financial markets and the macroeconomy can be strongly affected by changes in credit market regulations. In order to take account of these effects the authors control explicitly for regime shifts in a system of debt equations for Norway using a common, flexible trend. The...

Securitization has been widely assigned blame for contributing to the recent mortgage market meltdown and ensuing financial crisis. In this paper, we employ the OCC Home Equity database to develop estimates of default and prepayment probabilities for home equity lines of credit originated during...

How does creditor health impact the pass-through of monetary policy to households? Using data on the universe of US credit unions, I document that creditor asset losses increase the sensitivity of consumer credit to monetary policy. Identification exploits plausibly exogenous variation in asset...

Using Federal Reserve (Fed) confidential stress test data, we exploit the gap between the Fed and bank capital projections as an exogenous shock to banks and analyze how this shock is transmitted to consumer credit markets. First, we document that banks in the 90th percentile of the capital gap...