We document economically important correlations between children's future credit outcomes and their parents' credit risk scores, default, and the extent of credit constraints - intergenerational linkages in household credit. Using observations on siblings, we find that the linkages are due to...

Young borrowers are the least experienced financially and, conventionally, thought to be most prone to financial problems. Our results challenge the notion that young borrowers are bad credit card users. We first show that the CARD Act of 2009 succeeded in its aim of reducing young borrowers'...

We quantify the effect of recourse on default. We find that recourse affects default through lowering the borrower's sensitivity to negative equity. At the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans, borrowers are 30% more likely to default in non-recourse states; for homes appraised...