Modeling the credit card revolution: the role of debt collection and informal bankruptcy

Lukasz Drozd and Ricardo Serrano-Padial

No 13-12, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: In the data, most consumer defaults on unsecured credit are informal and the lending industry devotes significant resources to debt collection. We develop a new theory of credit card lending that takes these two features into account. The two key elements of our model are moral hazard and costly state verification that relies on the use of information technology. We show that the model gives rise to a novel channel through which IT progress can affect outcomes in the credit markets, and argue that this channel can be critical to understand the trends associated with the rapid expansion of credit card borrowing in the 1980s and over the 1990s. Independently, the mechanism of the model helps reconcile high levels of defaults and indebtedness observed in the US data.

Keywords: Credit cards; Consumer credit; Credit; Moral hazard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cta and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/asset ... ers/2013/wp13-12.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpwp:13-12

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Beth Paul ().