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Report
Payday holiday: how households fare after payday credit bans
Payday loans are widely condemned as a ?predatory debt trap.? We test that claim by researching how households in Georgia and North Carolina have fared since those states banned payday loans in May 2004 and December 2005. Compared with households in all other states, households in Georgia have bounced more checks, complained more to the Federal Trade Commission about lenders and debt collectors, and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection at a higher rate. North Carolina households have fared about the same. This negative correlation?reduced payday credit supply, increased credit ...
Journal Article
Driving a hard bargain
Tighter credit in the district may be adding to the woes of auto dealers.
Working Paper
Risk-based pricing of interest rates in household loan markets
Focusing on observable default risk's role in loan terms and the subsequent consequences for household behavior, this paper shows that lenders increasingly used risk-based pricing of interest rates in consumer loan markets during the mid-1990s. It tests three resulting predictions. First, the premium paid per unit of risk should have increased over this period. Second, debt levels should react accordingly. Third, fewer high-risk households should be denied credit, further contributing to the interest rate spread between the highest- and lowest-risk borrowers. For those obtaining loans, the ...
Working Paper
Household borrowing after personal bankruptcy
A large literature has examined factors leading to filing for personal bankruptcy, but little is known about household borrowing after bankruptcy. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that relative to comparable nonfilers, bankruptcy filers generally have more limited access to unsecured credit but borrow more secured debt post bankruptcy, and they pay higher interest rates on all types of debt. We also find that credit access and borrowing costs improve as more time passed since filing. However, filers experience renewed debt payment difficulties and accumulate less ...
Conference Paper
Consumer lending at community banks
Conference Paper
SMEs and bank lending relationships: the impact of mergers
This paper studies the impact of bank mergers on firm-bank lending relationships using information from individual loan contracts in Belgium. We analyze the effects of bank mergers on the probability of borrowers maintaining their lending relationships and on their ability to continue tapping bank credit. The Belgian financial environment reflects a number of interesting features: high banking sector concentration; ?in-market? mergers with large target banks; importance of large banks in providing external finance to SMEs; and low numbers of bank lending relationships maintained by SMEs. ; We ...
Working Paper
Testing for adverse selection and moral hazard in consumer loan markets
This paper explores the significance of unobservable default risk in mortgage and automobile loan markets. I develop and estimate a two-period model that allows for heterogeneous forms of simultaneous adverse selection and moral hazard. Controlling for income levels, loan size and risk aversion, I find robust evidence of adverse selection, with borrowers self-selecting into contracts with varying interest rates and collateral requirements. For example, ex-post higher-risk borrowers pledge less collateral and pay higher interest rates. Moreover, there is strongly suggestive evidence of moral ...
Report
Personal bankruptcy and credit market competition
The effect of credit market competition on borrower default is theoretically ambiguous, because the quantity of credit supplied may rise or fall following an increase in competition. We investigate empirically the relationship between credit market competition, lending to households, and personal bankruptcy rates in the United States. We exploit the exogenous variation in market contestability brought on by banking deregulation at the state level: after deregulation, banks faced the threat of entry into their state markets. We find that deregulation increased competition for borrowers, ...