The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Unemployment

Kyle F. Herkenhoff

No 25187, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Unemployed households' access to unsecured revolving credit more than tripled over the last three decades. This paper analyzes how both cyclical fluctuations and trend increases in credit access impact the business cycle. The main quantitative result is that credit expansions and contractions have contributed to moderately deeper and more protracted recessions over the last 40 years. As more individuals obtained credit from 1977 to 2010, cyclical credit fluctuations affected a larger share of the population and became more important determinants of employment dynamics. Even though business cycles are more volatile, newborns strictly prefer to live in the economy with growing, but fluctuating, access to credit markets.

JEL-codes: E2 E24 J01 J24 J6 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-mac
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published as Kyle F Herkenhoff, 2019. "The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Unemployment," The Review of Economic Studies, vol 86(6), pages 2605-2642.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25187.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Unemployment (2019)
Working Paper: The Impact of Consumer Credit Access on Unemployment (2014)
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:nbr:nberwo:25187

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25187

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().