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Biden Student Loan Relief Plan Allows Increased Borrowing, Less Repayment
The Biden plan is expected to boost participation in the income-driven repayments that lower the payment burden. Imposing a cap on a borrower’s income to qualify for cancellation or increasing the cancellation amount for low-income borrowers could alleviate the regressive nature of broad loan cancellation.
Working Paper
Health Insurance and Young Adult Financial Distress
We study the financial effects of health insurance for young adults using the Affordable Care Act’s dependent coverage mandate as a source of exogenous variation. Using nationally repre-sentative, anonymized credit report and publicly available survey data on medical expenditures, we exploit the mandate’s implementation in 2010 and its automatic disenrollment mechanism at age 26. Our estimates show that increasing access to health insurance lowered young adults’ out-of-pocket medical expenditures, debt in third-party collections, and the probability of per-sonal bankruptcy. However, ...
Working Paper
Is the grass really greener? Migrants' improvements in local labor market conditions and financial health
This paper documents several facts about internal migrants in the US that underlie substantial areas of economic research and policy making, but are rarely directly published. Using a large-sample, 23-year panel, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor ...
Working Paper
COVID-19 and Auto Loan Origination Trends
We study the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on auto loan origination activity during 2020. We focus on the dynamic impact of the crisis across lending channels, Equifax Risk Score (Risk Score) segments, and relevant geographic characteristics such as urbanization rate. We measure a significant drop in auto loan originations in March‒April followed by a near rebound in May‒June. Originations remain slightly depressed until October and fall again in November‒December. We document the largest drop and the smallest rebound in the subprime segment. We do not find any suggestive evidence that ...
Working Paper
The Persistence of Financial Distress
Using recently available proprietary panel data, we show that while many (35%) US consumers experience financial distress at some point in the life cycle, most of the events of financial distress are primarily concentrated in a much smaller proportion of consumers in persistent trouble. Roughly 10% of consumers are distressed for more than a quarter of the life cycle, and less than 10% of borrowers account for half of all distress events. These facts can be largely accounted for in a straightforward extension of a workhorse model of defaultable debt that accommodates a simple form of ...
Working Paper
Debt Collection Agencies and the Supply of Consumer Credit
This paper finds that stricter laws regulating third-party debt collection reduce the number of third-party debt collectors, lower the recovery rates on delinquent credit card loans, and lead to a modest decrease in the openings of new revolving lines of credit. Further, stricter third-party debt collection laws are associated with fewer consumer lawsuits against third-party debt collectors but not with a reduction in the overall number of consumer complaints. Overall, stricter third-party debt collection laws appear to restrict access to new revolving credit but have an ambiguous effect on ...
Working Paper
Prior Fraud Exposure and Precautionary Credit Market Behavior
This paper studies how past experiences with privacy shocks affect individuals' take-up of precautionary behavior when faced with a new privacy shock in the context of credit markets. We focus on experiences with identity theft and data breaches, two kinds of privacy shocks that either directly lead to fraud or put an individual at an elevated risk of experiencing fraud. Using the announcement of the 2017 Equifax data breach, we show that individuals with either kind of prior fraud exposure were more likely to freeze their credit report and close credit card accounts than individuals with no ...
Working Paper
Did the ACA's Dependent Coverage Mandate Reduce Financial Distress for Young Adults?
We analyze whether the passage of the Affordable Care Act's dependent coverage mandate in 2010 reduced financial distress for young adults. U sing nationally representative, anonymized consumer credit report information, we find that young adults covered by the mandate lowered their past due debt, had fewer delinquencies, and had a reduced probability of filing for bankruptcy. These effects are stronger in geographic areas that experienced higher uninsured rates for young adults prior to the mandate's implementation. Our estimates also show that some improvements are transitory because they ...
Working Paper
The Rise and Fall of Consumption in the 2000s
U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since the turn of the millennium, but the causes of these fluctuations are still imperfectly identified. We quantify the relative impact on consumption growth of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, expectations, foreclosures, inequality, and refinancings for four subperiods: the ?dot-com recession? (2001-2003), the ?subprime boom? (2004-2006), the Great Recession (2007-2009), and the ?tepid recovery? (2010-2012). We document that the explanatory power of different factors varies by subperiods, implying that a ...
Briefing
Firm Closures, a Global Phillips Curve, and More: A Recap of the Fall Research Workshop
How do firms decide how to locate their stores? Do payday loan regulations help or harm consumer welfare? How many firms go out of business due to financial market inefficiencies? These were among the questions addressed by researchers during a recent research workshop.