(Co)Authored

2022 | 7 | 27

  1. Medical Collection Removal
  • This report explores the characteristics of consumers with reported medical collections and focuses on the current state of medical collections that appear on consumer credit reports and medical collections that are likely to be removed from consumer credit reports in the next year.

2022 | 5 | 13

  1. Credit Card Late Fees
  • Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers had steadily been paying more in credit card late fees each year—peaking at over $14 billion in 2019. Late fees assessed by issuers declined to about $12 billion in 2020 given record-high payment rates and public and private relief efforts. Even during the pandemic, late fees accounted for over one-tenth of the $120 billion consumers pay in credit card interest and fees annually. In 2021, total late fee volume was on the rise again

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2022 | 2 | 11

  1. Delinquency Rates and the “Missing Originations” in the Auto Loan Market
  • One of the surprising characteristics of the economic downturn induced by the COVID-19 pandemic is that delinquency rates in most consumer credit markets have remained low both during the downturn and the subsequent recovery. The existing literature has emphasized the roles that forbearance policies and various government stimulus programs played in helping households meet their debt obligations (Dettling and Lambie-Hanson, 2021; Bakshi and Rose, 2021). In this note, we examine an additional factor that has contributed to low delinquency rates: a drop in originations of new loans to risky borrowers most likely to become delinquent.

2021 | 7 | 15

  1. Credit Bureau Entry Age and First Credit Type Effects on Credit Score
  • This note presents some statistics regarding the distribution of the ages of consumers as they are added to credit reporting data and the longer-term implications of their entry-age and initial credit type.

2021 | 4 | 30

  1. Developments in the Credit Score Distribution over 2020
  • The distribution of household credit risk can vary with aggregate economic and credit conditions. For example, the share of subprime-scored borrowers declined at a relatively steady pace during the economic recovery from the Global Financial Crisis. Although the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the economic conditions that supported this trend, the pace of decline accelerated following the pandemic’s onset in March 2020.

Assisted

2021 | 1 | 1

  1. Is Lending Distance Really Changing? Distance Dynamics and Loan Composition in Small Business Lending
  • Has information technology improved small businesses’ credit access by hardening the information used in loan underwriting and reducing the importance of lender proximity? Previous research, pointing to increasing average lending distances, suggests that it has. Using over 20 years of Community Reinvestment Act data, we find that while average distances have increased substantially, distances at individual banks remain unchanged. Instead, average distance has increased because a small group of lenders specializing in high-volume, small-loan lending nationwide have increased their share of small business lending by 10 percentage points. Our findings imply that small businesses continue to depend on local banks