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Credit card delinquency and Covid-19: Neighborhood trends in the Seventh District
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in great economic and financial disruption. To better understand how financial hardships have varied across communities, we investigate credit card delinquencies across the states of the Federal Reserve’s Seventh District: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. While we find a slight increase of less than 1 percentage point in delinquency rates across the District overall following the onset of the pandemic, we find more pronounced increases of about 2 percentage points in low- and moderate-income (LMI) neighborhoods and about 3 percentage ...
Journal Article
Advancing Regional Prosperity through Economic Inclusion: A Brief Conversation with Chicago Planning Agencies
For years, arguments on behalf of economic inclusion were built on the principles of equity and justice ? the idea that everyone, including those with less income or fewer assets, should have access to resources and opportunities. But more recently, a growing number of entities, including metropolitan planning organizations, have broadened the motivation for inclusiveness to argue for the benefits that it bestows on all residents of a region, not just to those in economically marginalized neighborhoods. Two recent publications, "Inclusive Growth, "by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for ...
Journal Article
Who has credit card debt?
For many households, the amount owed on their credit cards constitutes a large and growing share of their total debt. This article uses responses to the Consumer Finance Monthly (CFM) to examine credit card debt among households of varying incomes, educational attainment, and other characteristic. The CFM asks a different set of 150 to 300 households each month about their financial assets and debts, where they conduct their financial transactions, and what their expectations and attitudes are regarding their finance
Journal Article
Measuring Small Business Financial Health
Throughout the Great Recession and continuing into the recovery, small businesses have played an important role in creating jobs and stabilizing communities. Stories of small business owners overcoming obstacles to provide valuable services and employment are highlighted regularly by pundits, politicians and policymakers alike. However, little attention has focused on the question of what drives the financial health of these often young, often very small businesses.
Journal Article
Islamic finance: meeting financial needs with faith based products
This article explores the demand for and the availability of financial products for Muslims who adhere to religious prohibitions against receiving and paying interest. This is an evolving area of consumer and small business finance, and the goal of this article is to provide an overview of the potential market for Islamic finance, to describe the organizations that currently provide these products, and to highlight some of the challenges of satisfying both religious tenets and government regulations. Two facets of financial products, asset financing, and investments, are addressed. ...
Journal Article
Small Business Performance in Industries in LMI Neighborhoods After the Great Recession: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles
Small businesses are essential to the economic infrastructure of both lower-income and higher-income neighborhoods. In this report, we compare small business performance in lower-income vs higher-income areas. Findings offer some directions for growing small businesses in LMI and ethnic/minority neighborhoods