Credit Card Debt and the Provision of Financial Support to Kin in the US

Maude Pugliese (), Céline Le Bourdais and Shelley Clark
Additional contact information
Maude Pugliese: Institut National de La Recherche Scientifique
Céline Le Bourdais: McGill University
Shelley Clark: McGill University

Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 2021, vol. 42, issue 4, No 4, 616-632

Abstract: Abstract Credit card debt stands at over $1 trillion in the US and grows continuously. Scholars have argued that high (and growing) levels of credit card debt are attributable in part to rising economic vulnerabilities, combined with a thinning public safety net, credit cards being increasingly employed to make ends meet in this context. This paper extends this line of work by stressing that individuals and households do not rely on their credit cards only to mitigate their own financial hardships, but also those experienced by their non-coresidential kin members. More specifically, building on the notion that kin networks can constitute a source of negative social capital, we argue that individuals often accumulate credit card debt as they attempt to provide monetary assistance to their relatives in need. We also show that this effect is particularly strong in lower-income groups and in African American communities, in which need levels are especially high. Based on random and fixed effects analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, these insights extend scholarship on both kin networks of support and the sources of credit card debt.

Keywords: Credit card debt; Kinship networks; Informal financial support; Negative social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10834-020-09731-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jfamec:v:42:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s10834-020-09731-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/10834/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10834-020-09731-7

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Family and Economic Issues is currently edited by Joyce Serido

More articles in Journal of Family and Economic Issues from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().