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Discussion Paper
Deconstructing Mechanic’s Liens
In this paper, we examine a new data set composed of mechanic’s lien complaints filed in the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia County). Over a 10-year period, 426 mechanic’s liens were filed against 398 single-family properties, which is less than 0.1 percent of single-family properties in Philadelphia. The lien properties in our data set tend to be more expensive, newer, and larger than non-lien properties. About 80 percent of mechanic’s liens are filed by general contractors, with the remainder pursued by a subcontractor. Notably, a 2014 change in Pennsylvania law ...
Discussion Paper
Can Data Sharing Help Financial Institutions Improve the Financial Health of Older Americans?
This paper explores how increased data sharing among financial institutions could improve the financial outcomes of older adults suffering from cognitive impairment. Among the first signs of cognitive impairment in older adults is a decline in financial capacity, which is also a risk factor for abuse or exploitation. Banks and other financial institutions are at the front lines to monitor and detect changes in financial capacity and susceptibility to fraud and abuse. However, industry experts have found that, in many cases, no mechanism exists for financial service providers to communicate ...
Discussion Paper
Quantifying Cyber Risk in the Financial Services Industry
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in February 2017 featuring James Fox, partner and principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a leading authority on cybersecurity in the financial services industry. He discussed the importance of measuring cyber risk, highlighted some challenges that financial institutions face in measuring cyber risk, and assessed several leading cyber-risk management methodologies. Fox also provided some recommendations for bank exams and insights into how federal agencies might begin to quantify systemic cyber risk. This paper summarizes Fox?s ...
Report
How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Supply of Consumer Credit?
For credit card companies and other lenders, the pandemic has created a variety of risks and challenges. This report examines how credit card lenders have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Report
Overdraft Use During the Pandemic: Insights from the CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers
This research brief examines consumers’ use of checking account overdrafts since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, using responses gathered from a special module in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Consumer Finance Institute COVID-19 Survey of Consumers conducted between July 5 and 16, 2021. The overdraft module includes responses from a national sample of 3,615 consumers, 1,054 of whom reported experiencing at least one overdraft charge during the crisis. Respondents provided their demographic and employment characteristics as part of the broader survey. Survey participants ...
Report
Aging, Cognition, and Financial Health: Building a Robust System for Older Americans
This paper summarizes a November 2017 conference cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia?s Consumer Finance Institute and the University of Pennsylvania?s Penn Memory Center and Healthy Brain Research Center. As cognitive abilities decline, older adults may make poor financial judgments and become vulnerable to exploitation and fraud. The potential damage to individual finances as well as to the nation?s financial system will increase as the baby boom generation ages into retirement. The goal of the conference was to discuss actions that members of the financial services ...
Report
Secured Card Market Update
For more than 40 years, secured credit cards have enabled borrowers with limited or damaged credit histories to obtain credit, often with many of the benefits of traditional, unsecured credit cards. Despite the recent development of alternative credit-building products, the secured card has not been left behind and, in fact, continues to be a focal point of fintech innovation and new product offerings. In this special report, we update previous research by the Consumer Finance Institute on secured cards using data from the country’s largest financial institutions. As of September 2023, ...
Discussion Paper
How Prevalent Were Racially Restrictive Covenants in 20th Century Philadelphia? A New Spatial Data Set Provides Answers
One of the tools used by early 20th century developers, builders, and white homeowners to prevent African Americans from accessing parts of the residential real estate market was the racially restrictive covenant. In this paper, we present a newly constructed spatial data set of properties in the city of Philadelphia with deeds that contained a racially restrictive covenant at any time from 1920 to 1932. To date, we have reviewed hundreds of thousands of property deeds and identified nearly 4,000 instances in which a racial covenant had been included in the deed. The covenanted properties ...
Discussion Paper
Moving into the Mainstream: Who Graduates from Secured Credit Card Programs?
Secured credit cards--credit cards whose limit is fully or partially collateralized by a bank deposit--are considered a gateway product to mainstream credit access. As consumers demonstrate good usage and repayment behavior, they may be offered the opportunity to graduate to an unsecured credit card. This paper uses anonymized account-level data to examine the prevalence of account graduation in the secured credit card market since 2012. Using a fixed effects regression model, we identify a set of usage and repayment behaviors that are correlated with account graduation.
Working Paper
Foreclosure Kids: Examining the Early Adult Credit Usage of Adolescents Affected by Foreclosure
We investigate the long-term effects of foreclosure-induced relocations on adolescents and their subsequent use of credit. We ask whether individuals who experience a foreclosure-induced move between the ages of 10 and 17 are more likely to exhibit signs of credit scarring later in life. To establish a set of counterfactual outcomes, we implement propensity score matching with exact matching on certain characteristics and regression adjustment of the remaining covariate imbalances. We then compare the credit behavior of individuals who experienced a foreclosure-induced move in adolescence to ...