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...

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...

Why do retail consumers look for P2P financial intermediation? Are internetbased peer-to-peer (P2P) loans a substitute for or a complement to bank loans? In this study we answer these questions by comparing P2P lending with the nonconstruction consumer credit market in Germany. We show that P2P...