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Discussion Paper
Top of the Class Assessing the Credit Performance of Graduates from Secured Credit Card Programs
Secured credit cards, whose limit is fully or partially collateralized by a bank deposit, serve as viable options for consumers seeking to build new credit or to repair a damaged credit history. Demonstrated repayment behavior over time can qualify secured cardholders for “graduation” to a standard unsecured credit card. This paper uses anonymized account-level data to examine how secured card borrowers perform after graduation by matching samples of graduates with similar groups of borrowers who open new unsecured cards without having graduated from a secured card program. Using a ...