Buying a house changes a household's balance sheet by simultaneously reducing liquidity and introducing mortgage payments, which may leave the household more exposed to other shocks. We find that this change affects credit card use in two ways: A debt effect increases credit card spending, while...

We estimate a two-stage Heckman selection model of credit card adoption and use with a unique dataset that combines administrative data from the Equifax credit bureau and self-reported data from the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, a representative survey of US consumers. Even though the...

The analysis sets out to clarify whether households’ demand for consumer credit can be adequately explained by models presented in the literature (life-cycle and permanent income) or whether other factors are observable, such as the use of debt to alleviate financial difficulties. With this in...