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Discussion Paper
Why Are Credit Card Rates So High?
Drechsler, Itamar; Jung, Hyeyoon; Peng, Weiyu; Supera, Dominik; Zhou, Guanyu (2025-03-31)
Credit cards play a crucial role in U.S. consumer finance, with 74 percent of adults having at least one. They serve as the main method of payment for most individuals, accounting for 70 percent of retail spending. They are also the primary source of unsecured borrowing, with 60 percent of accounts carrying a balance from one month to the next. Surprisingly, credit card interest rates are very high, averaging 23 percent annually in 2023. Indeed, their rates are far higher than the rates on any other major type of loan or bond. Why are credit card rates so high? In our recent research paper, ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20250331

Working Paper
Navigating Higher Education Insurance: An Experimental Study on Demand and Adverse Selection
Balakrishnan, Sidhya; Bettinger, Eric; Kofoed, Michael S.; Ritter, Dubravka; Webber, Douglas A.; Aksu, Ege; Hartley, Jonathan S. (2024-04-19)
We conduct a survey-based experiment with 2,776 students at a non-profit university to analyze income insurance demand in education financing. We offered students a hypothetical choice: either a federal loan with income-driven repayment or an income-share agreement (ISA), with randomized framingof downside protections. Emphasizing income insurance increased ISA uptake by 43%. We observe that students are responsive to changes in contract terms and possible student loan cancellation, which is evidence of preference adjustment or adverse selection. Our results indicate that framing specific ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2024-024

Working Paper
Rational but Not Prescient: Borrowing during the Fracking Boom
Berkowitz, Daniel; Boslett, Andrew J.; Brown, Jason; Weber, Jeremy G. (2022-05-23)
To study how income expectations affect borrowing, we use leased natural gas rights in Texas in the mid-2000s, which created potential for future leaseholder income without loosening credit constraints. In matching 11,000 leaseholders with non-leaseholders selected from a screened pool of 5.2 million, we find that the average leaseholder borrowed $13,000 more over the 2003–08 leasing boom. A consumption-smoothing modelindicates that leaseholders’ income expectations aligned with forecasts of persistently high natural gas prices. Yet, the unforeseeable success of fracking was associated ...
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 2022-05

Working Paper
On the Importance of Household versus Firm Credit Frictions in the Great Recession
Pastorino, Elena; Lopez, Pierlauro; Midrigan, Virgiliu; Kehoe, Patrick J. (2020-09-25)
Although a credit tightening is commonly recognized as a key determinant of the Great Recession, to date, it is unclear whether a worsening of credit conditions faced by households or by firms was most responsible for the downturn. Some studies have suggested that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively the most important one. Many others contend that the firm-side channel played a crucial role. We propose a model in which both channels are present and explicitly formalized. Our analysis indicates that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively more relevant than the ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-28

Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score
Dempsey, Kyle; Corbae, Dean; Rios-Rull, Jose-Victor; Chatterjee, Satyajit (2020-08-05)
What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand in for a market assessment of a person's unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person's type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both ...
Working Papers , Paper 770

Report
Credit Card Banking
Drechsler, Itamar; Jung, Hyeyoon; Peng, Weiyu; Supera, Dominik; Zhou, Guanyu (2025-03-01)
Credit card interest rates, the marginal cost of consumption for nearly half of households, currently average 23 percent, far exceeding the rates on any other major type of loan or bond. Why are these rates so high? To understand this, and the economics of credit card banking more generally, we analyze regulatory account-level data on 330 million monthly accounts, representing 90 percent of the US credit card market. Default rates are relatively high at around 5 percent, but explain only a fraction of cards’ rates. Non-interest expenses and rewards payments are more than offset by ...
Staff Reports , Paper 1143

Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score
Dempsey, Kyle; Corbae, Dean; Rios-Rull, Jose-Victor; Chatterjee, Satyajit (2020-09-30)
What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand-in for a market assessment of a person’s unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a person’s type via Bayesian updating. We show how dynamic reputation can incentivize repayment without monetary costs of default beyond the administrative cost of filing for bankruptcy. Importantly, we show how an economy with credit scores implements the same equilibrium allocation. We estimate the model using both ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-39

Working Paper
Life-Cycle Portfolio Choices and Heterogeneous Stock Market Expectations
Velásquez-Giraldo, Mateo (2024-12-20)
Survey measurements of households’ expectations about U.S. equity returns show substantial heterogeneity and large departures from the historical distribution of actual returns. The average household perceives a lower probability of positive returns and a greater probability of extreme returns than history has exhibited. I build a life-cycle model of saving and portfolio choices that incorporates beliefs estimated to match these survey measurements of expectations. This modification enables the model to greatly reduce a tension in the literature in which models that have aimed to match ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2024-097

Discussion Paper
Racial Differences in Mortgage Refinancing, Distress, and Housing Wealth Accumulation during COVID-19
Gerardi, Kristopher S.; Lambie-Hanson, Lauren; Willen, Paul S. (2021-06-22)
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated racial disparities in U.S. mortgage markets. Black, Hispanic, and Asian borrowers were significantly more likely than white borrowers to miss payments due to financial distress, and significantly less likely to refinance to take advantage of the large decline in interest rates spurred by the Federal Reserve’s large-scale mortgage-backed security (MBS) purchase program. The wide-scale forbearance program, introduced by the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, provided approximately equal payment relief to all distressed borrowers, ...
Consumer Finance Institute discussion papers , Paper 21-02

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